Exchange-Traded Funds for Dummies

As it happens, the true stars of the small-cap world have been small-cap value stocks rather than small-cap growth stocks. (Take a look at Chapters 5 and 6 if you aren’t sure what I mean by these terms.) How slow-growing, often ailing companies have beat out their hot-to-trot cousins remains one of the great, unresolved mysteries of the investing w

ETFs are cheap. At least 250 ETFs charge annual management expenses of 0.10 percent or lower, and a few charge as little as 0.00

Russell’s review: The price is right. The index makes sense. There’s good diversification. The companies represented are certainly large. The ETF has been around since 2002. No one has more experience with indexing than Vanguard. This ETF is a very good option, although I’d like it even more if it were a tad more valuey. (On the other hand, making

If you really want to keep things simple, you can buy a single ETF that tracks an index of all stocks everywhere, U.S. and foreign. That one fund would be either the Vanguard Total World Stock ETF (VT), with an expense ratio of 0.08 percent, or the SPDR Portfolio MSCI Global Stock Market ETF (SPGM), with an expense ratio of 0.09 percent. Both are p

Modern Portfolio Theory is to investing what the discovery of gravity was to physics. Almost. What the theory says is that the volatility/risk of a portfolio may differ dramatically from the volatility/risk of the portfolio’s components. In other words, you can have two assets with both high standard deviations and high potential returns, but when

Vanguard Global ex-U.S. Real Estate ETF (VNQI) Indexed to: S&P Global ex-U.S. Property Index, which tracks the performance of REITs in both developed and emerging markets outside of the United States Expense ratio: 0.12 percent Number of holdings: 680 Top five holdings: Vonovia, SE, Mitsubishi Estate Co., Ltd., Goodman Group, Sun Hung Kai Prope

A limit order to buy asks you to name a price above which you walk away and go home. No purchase will be made. (A limit order to sell asks you to name a price below which you will not sell. No sale will be made.)

Let’s compare the two: During the 30-year period from 1990 through to the end of 2020, the U.S. stock market, as measured by the S&P 500 Index, provided an annual rate of return of 10.7 percent. Yet the average stock fund investor, according to a study by the Massachusetts-based research firm Dalbar, earned an annual rate of 6.24 percent over t

Whatever your allocation to domestic large-cap stocks, I recommend that you invest anywhere from 40 to 50 percent of that amount in growth. Take a tilt toward value, if you want, but don’t tilt so far that you risk tipping over.