Tips

February 11, 2020 Personal 10 Comments

12 Budgeting Tips for New Parents

November 20, 2018 ETF 10 Comments

Is It Time To Buy TIPS ETFs, Mutual Funds?

Is It Time To Buy TIPS ETFs, Mutual Funds? … investments in TIPS ETFs or mutual funds. Why? I rely on individual I Bonds and TIPS, held to maturity, to fill my allocation. Yet, I can understand that this investment style isn’t for everyone. Continue reading at seekingalpha.com How Investors Face Inflation With TIPS [See: […]

November 24, 2017 Personal One Comment

4 Money-Management Tips To Help You Bootstrap Your Business

4 Money-Management Tips To Help You Bootstrap Your Business Sometimes, people who aspire to be business owners have this idea that they’ll pitch their idea, get millions of dollars in funding and start spending money like pro athletes. But, if they’re anything like the average American, they’ll have an … Continue reading at msn.com Curtis […]

November 1, 2017 ETF 4 Comments

3 Tips for Building a Socially Responsible Bond Portfolio

3 Tips for Building a Socially Responsible Bond Portfolio one investment at a time.” [See: 7 Socially Responsible ETFs for Investors of All Stripes.] The Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment estimates that $ 8.72 trillion was invested in socially responsible investments through the end of 2015. Continue reading at money.usnews.com VictoryShares Introduces High Dividend […]

October 31, 2016 ETF No Comments

TIPS ETFs May Be Better Alternative to Treasuries

TIPS ETFs May Be Better Alternative to Treasuries “TIPS are for winners.” Pacific Investment Management Co. and Goldman Sachs Asset … With inflation expectations rising, ETF investors have turned to TIPS options. Treasury inflation-protected securities, or TIPS, are a type of Treasury security … Continue reading at etftrends.com BlackRock: TIPS Make More Sense Than Treasuries […]

August 12, 2016 ETF No Comments

Time May Be Prime For TIPS ETFs

July 31, 2016 Large Cap No Comments

Three Tips for Investing in Biotech Stocks

Three Tips for Investing in Biotech Stocks The pipeline is driving earnings. Barron’s noted earlier this year that RBC is optimistic about Q1 earnings for several large-cap biotech stocks, among them Celgene. As Money Morning’s Tremblay points out, while investing in biotech stocks with great … Continue reading at moneymorning.com 7 Warren Buffett investing tips […]

June 29, 2016 Large Cap No Comments

A ‘historic’ investing opportunity and other post-Brexit tips for the long term

A ‘historic’ investing opportunity and other post-Brexit tips for the long term Here are some basic moves retail investors can make while traders on Wall Street look for the Brexit dust to settle: Credit Suisse is telling clients to look beyond the fear in headline-grabbing large-cap stocks and turn focus to smaller companies. Continue reading […]

The old Chinese curse, "may you live in interesting times", has particular relevance to the current epoch of U.S. history. There's a lot going on right now, much of it scary. Major investors around the world are responding to the events of our perilous age by sinking their dollars, deutschmarks and yen into gold, silver and palladium; Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and billionaire speculator George Soros to name but a few. Big financial institutions like the Central Banks of Russia and China are also leaping onto the metals bandwagon driving the price of these precious commodities ever higher.

While ranking providers are careful to warn investors that their ratings don't foretell the future, the star system is, unfortunately, used by some investors as if they were reading Consumer Reports to purchase a new drill. Supporters of the ranking approach argue that there's no subjective component to the star rating. It isn't determined by an analyst's review, and can't change simply because the service dislikes the fund's manager or its investment strategy. And that's good.

Performance will vary. Fund performance often falls off and risk levels rise during the subsequent three years after a fund is given an initial five-star Morningstar rating, suggests another recent study by Matthew Morey, a professor at Pace University. One reason for this is that after receiving a five-star rating the size of the fund grows dramatically, which then makes the fund unwieldy to manage, he suggests. Since Morey's study was completed, Morningstar also has changed the way it doles out top rankings to make them more precise. One of the biggest problems with all rating systems is that they are not necessarily predictive in nature. This means they're not really set up to tell you whether certain funds will necessarily do better in the future. For the most part, the ratings indicate how much you might have made and how much aggravation you faced in the process.