Some helpful links…

This blog is dedicated to cutting through all the noise out there and looking at current news through a long-term disciplined lens. With that being said, there are actually a lot of good resources that preach many of the same things I’m attempting to. With that in mind, every once in a while I will provide some links that either say what I want to say (and often say it better than I could) or are just quick hits that introduce you to other writers and resources that you may want to explore further.

  • First up, a review of the PBS Frontline documentary “Retirement Gamble” from a few weeks back. I haven’t had a chance to watch the entire documentary yet, but the author here makes some valid points. The 401k world is an expensive world unfortunately—the largest companies can get fees relatively low, but smaller plans (less than $20 million in assets) will struggle to do so simply due to scale. Even the best plans that have several index fund options can still see administrative costs eat away at returns. With that said, 401k’s still have wonderful benefits such as constant savings and employer contributions on your behalf. If you do your research and diversify through the best (read: lowest cost) funds available, you can still do very well. Hopefully more attention like this will continue to force companies to improve their retirement plans.
  • Here’s some simple advice. Consolidate, use index funds, and have a savings plan. The last segment about all-in-one funds is true regarding simplification, but just remember to apply the same principles as you would to any mutual fund: keep it passive and low-cost.
  • I thought this was an interesting discussion. This speaks to a point I’ve made here before regarding short-term noise. Kitces shows (and I know from running so many cash flow scenarios with clients) that short-term dips hardly affect a long-term plan assuming there isn’t an emotional reaction that causes a change of course. There is, however, always the risk of lower than expected long-term returns—what I’ve taken to calling “generational risk”. The way to mitigate this risk is to return to what we can control: savings, spending, and retirement date. The more willing you are to adjust these variables, the less long-term damage a prolonged market slump can cause. For many of you reading this, the variable you can adjust now is your savings.
  • Lastly, I thought this was terrific. Nothing else to add on my end.

Several of you readers have sent me questions or comments building off these posts and I continue to encourage that. The discussions resulting from that have been very fulfilling, at least on my end. Always feel free to e-mail me with any follow-ups at sam.swift@tciwealth.com.

Some helpful links…

This blog is dedicated to cutting through all the noise out there and looking at current news through a long-term disciplined lens. With that being said, there are actually a lot of good resources that preach many of the same things I’m attempting to. With that in mind, every once in a while I will [...]

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Old Newsletter, Same Principles

We’ve been doing some Spring Cleaning around the office here and came across some fascinating documents from the early days of TCI. For those of you who don’t know, TCI was started here in Tucson in 1990 by Bob Swift initially as a series of classes on investor education. You can read a bit more [...]

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Fiduciary Standard Video

I have a soft spot for these types of videos for some reason. It could be that I enjoy pointing out absurd and hypocritical arguments through monotone. Of course, it might just bring me back to those elementary school days when we would type inappropriate phrases into the voice program and see how the computer [...]

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AP Tweet

Something happened two days ago that you would have literally missed if you blinked. You may have heard about it by now, but the Associated Press twitter feed was briefly hacked and sent out a tweet saying that there were two explosions at the White House and President Obama was injured. The Dow dropped 150 [...]

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Failure of Active Management Continued…

I had a good back and forth e-mail conversation with a client about last week’s post and it inspired me to dive further into the problems of active management. We covered the actual underperformance numbers last week, but here we’ll discuss a few reasons why that’s the case. First and foremost, actively managed funds charge [...]

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Failure of Active Management

04-11-13 Failure of Active Management Equity

This week, I wanted to revisit a topic I’ve touched on before which is the aggregate failure of active management. As a brief reminder, there are essentially two camps to choose from when looking at mutual funds. First, there are index funds which seek to match the return of a given set of stocks or [...]

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A Few Links..

First, I wanted to direct your attention to an editorial I wrote in Inside Tucson Business for last Friday. It has a lot of the same themes I hammer on here (shocking, I know), but I can’t stress enough what a tremendous opportunity young people have to determine their own financial future. It’s easier said [...]

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Generational Risk

03-28-13 Generational Risk

I was pointed to an article this week that really got me going in several different directions: What can you expect from the market in the long run? The chart from The New York Times (originally created by Ed Easterling with Crestmont Research) is what really fascinated me, and I suggest you click on this [...]

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A Few Quick Thoughts…

A few quick thoughts: As a follow-up to last week’s post with the chart on bear and bull markets throughout history, Mickey Abeshaus, a fellow advisor here, reminded me of a fascinating stat. The average greatest intra-year drop, no matter what the market does for the year overall, is 14%. (As an example to clarify, [...]

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Bull and Bear Markets Through History

03-14-13 Bull and Bear Markets Through History

I just presented a webinar to TCI clients yesterday where I presented this slide showing Bull Markets and Bear Markets throughout history to give a little perspective and I wanted to expand a few of my thoughts here. By the way, the webinar itself was recorded and will be archived on the main TCI website [...]

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