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“What do you mean he quit?” I asked my Nana. “He hasn’t had a cigarette in three weeks now,” she responded. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My maternal grandfather, who I call Papa, had been smoking his whole life. And I mean his whole life. He started smoking at age 12 and recently quit at age 74. That’s 62 years of being a smoker. 62 years! His nicotine habit could qualif...

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Corey Hoffstein recently brought the following chart to my attention which shows the required allocation to earn a 7.5% expected return in 1995, 2005, and 2015: As you can see, the days of decent returns for low risk are far behind us. Investors can no longer rely solely on fixed income to generate a portfolio with good returns. Instead they have had to increase their exposure to equities and alternatives to make up the ...

The post Are We Craving Risk or Losing Reward? appeared first on Of Dollars And Data.

Over the weekend Robert Kiyosaki, author of the popular Rich Dad, Poor Dad, called for a “giant stock market crash” in October: Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time that Kiyosaki has called for a major crash in the last decade, as FinTwit was quick to point out. As soon as Kiyosaki sent his tweet, the replies started pouring in. Luc ten Have beautifully responded with this chart showing the increasi...

The post The Broken Clock appeared first on Of Dollars And Data.

Previously I’ve written about why buying the dip can’t beat dollar cost averaging, even if you were God. However, I feel like that article was a bit too extreme. Buy the Dip was defeated in one fell swoop. It never had a fighting chance. There was no last meal, no departing words, and no funeral procession that followed. But today, I’m going to change all that. Because today I’m going to give Buy t...

The post Why Buying the Dip is a Terrible Investment Strategy appeared first on Of Dollars And Data.

I was 11 years old when 9/11 happened. I was on my way to school in Southern California when I heard the hosts of my mom’s favorite morning radio show laughing on air. They were joking that some dumb pilot had crashed into the World Trade Center. This went on for a few minutes before they announced that a second plane had hit the South Tower. Then they stopped laughing. Shortly thereafter I arrived at my step-grandm...

The post Never Forget appeared first on Of Dollars And Data.

One of the longest studies on human happiness started in 1938 and followed the lives of 268 Harvard sophomores. Known as the Harvard Study of Adult Development, it tracked everything about these men over decades. Their health, their careers, their relationships, and much more were recorded for the study. And after analyzing the lifetimes of data, the researchers came to a surprising conclusion: Close relationships, more ...

The post What Really Predicts Happiness? appeared first on Of Dollars And Data.

It seems like the world of cryptocurrency has come back from the dead. Bitcoin is once again trading around $50,000, NFTs are selling at record volumes, and payment providers are continuing to expand their crypto services. For crying out loud, images of pet rocks are selling for over $1 million. What is going on here? Was there some revolution in cryptoland that I missed? Did the world suddenly wake up, break out of its p...

The post Price Rules Everything Around Me appeared first on Of Dollars And Data.

The S&P 500 recently hit its 50th all-time high of the year and it’s only August. That’s the second most for any year (through August) since 1950. Given this information, many investors are currently wondering: are we in a melt-up? For the uninitiated, a melt-up is a “sustained and often unexpected improvement in the investment performance of an asset or asset class.” Unfortunately, it’s ...

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This week’s post is inspired by a poll that Jake (@Econompic) asked on Twitter: You are 25 year old interested in a career in investment management. A genie appears offering you one of the following (with all the learning, networking, benefits, etc… auto populated into your background). Which do you think best improves your career prospects? CFA designation MBA from top tier school Great first job Rich parent...

The post The Best Advantage in Life appeared first on Of Dollars And Data.

There’s lots of great career advice out there. Follow your passion. Find a mentor. Expand your network. Unfortunately, advice like this tends to be too abstract to be useful most of the time. For example, let’s say you find a mentor. How do you know if they are the right mentor? You don’t. The same can be said for lots of other career advice out there. Sometimes it’s just too fuzzy to be helpful. T...

The post Want to Improve Your Career? Become an Uncertainty Killer appeared first on Of Dollars And Data.

Recently a friend asked me: What keeps you up at night financially? What is your version of an investing nightmare? Fortunately, I don’t have anything that keeps me up at night (I tend to be an optimist), but if I had to describe my investing nightmare, it wouldn’t be something we haven’t seen in recent decades. In fact, I’d argue we haven’t seen it within the last 100 years of U.S. market hi...

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If I had to convince my 22 year-old self to save more money, here is what I would say: Go big, then stop. This phrase might not mean anything to you yet, but in a few moments it will. What I’m talking about is a savings philosophy so effective that it can put your future finances on easy mode. It can help you to build wealth for decades while you literally do nothing. It may just be the lowest effort way to set your...

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I recently read a blog post from Patrick Stanley where he claimed: By the end of this decade, almost everyone who’s online will become an investor. I agree with Stanley’s assertion, but what he is describing has mostly already happened. Over the last few hundred years, and especially over the last half century, investing has evolved from something only done by the rich and powerful to something done by everyda...

The post We Are All Investors Now appeared first on Of Dollars And Data.

Imagine you just got a new job offer or you’ve been working in a job for a few years without a raise. Should you ask for more? Or should you wait it out? How much does a raise early in your career actually affect your long-term finances? The answer is…it depends. It depends on the size of your raise, the timing of your raise, and how much of your raise you save as well. This article will dig into each of these...

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One of the most common criticisms I get on this blog is an overemphasis on the U.S. stock market when discussing how investing can make you rich. I will admit that the U.S. has had a more successful investment environment (especially for stocks) than many other countries around the world. However, global stocks are nothing to be overlooked either. While the U.S. is clearly an outlier on the world stage, most of the strate...

The post In Defense of Global Stocks appeared first on Of Dollars And Data.

A reader from Nashville asks: Have you done any research into what would happen if we had a lost decade but you dollar cost average (“DCA”) through your 401(k)? Where you would end up? Though I have preached the importance of continually buying a diverse set of income-producing assets for years now, I didn’t actually have an answer to this question…until now. What follows is my examination of DCA (...

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