Buy & Hold

The following is a guest post from Dylan Ross, CFP and founder of Swan Financial Planning.
How would you like to like to participate in the good stock market returns, but not lose any money, even if the market goes to zero? No, I’m not about to invite you to a free lunch seminar to pitch [...]

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I frequently mention that, when selecting mutual funds, it’s generally advantageous to look for funds with low turnover.
What I’ve noticed from comments on the blog and emails I’ve received is that some investors seem to miss the fact that the same thing applies to our own portfolios. Generally speaking, increased turnover is a bad thing.
Increased [...]

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According to Morningstar, the average annual turnover within domestic stock funds is 104%. In other words, on average, domestic equity funds hold a stock for just 351 days before selling it.
Of course, such high turnover has a negative impact on returns in that it substantially increases costs. But even leaving that issue aside for a [...]

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I’m not kidding or exaggerating when I suggest that people ignore what the market does from day-to-day, month-to-month, or quarter-to-quarter.
As far as I’m concerned, two glances at my portfolio each year is plenty. Now, before you decide I’m completely crazy, let me remind you that I’m not alone. Some respected investors hold similar opinions:
“Try and [...]

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I recently came across this clip of Suze Orman discussing passive, index investing. In it, she provides us with the following insight:
“I’m not sure you can buy and hold that way and just forget about everything as if everything will be OK.”
If you look around the realm of personal finance (online or offline), you’ll be [...]

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Over the last several weeks I’ve been mulling over exactly how low the market would have to go before I became uncomfortable buying stocks.  The more I thought about it, the more sure I became that there’s no point at which I’d stop buying stocks.
If the market dropped to 1/4 its current price (yeah, that’d [...]

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I thought I’d share with you one of my favorite pieces of financial advice:
When to buy: When you’ve got money to invest. (“When you can”)
When to sell: When you need to liquidate something in order to pay your bills. (“When you have to”)
Note that none of the following words are included: market, attractive, up, down, [...]

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Miranda’s comment on last Thursday’s post reminded me of a conversation I had about a few weeks ago with my friend Shannon.
Shannon is just getting started investing, and she already has a great system in place: Automatic deposits from her checking account into diversified mutual funds in a Roth IRA. Perfect.
As happens so frequently these [...]

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During my time as a Financial Advisor, I slowly came to realize that which funds people invested in wasn’t really the biggest factor in determining their investment results. What mattered far more was how they invested.
During that time, I met several people who had been successful in building their fortunes via investing. Most of them [...]

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One of the very first things you need to figure out when you’re starting to invest is what time frame you’re looking at.  Are you going to need this money six months from now, two years from now, or 30 years from now? The answer makes a big difference as to which type(s) of investments [...]

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