The US stock market is heavily concentrated in a handful of technology companies, and many investors and commentators find this alarming - arguing that such concentration makes the market riskier.

Many of us sit on the advisory boards and investment committees of university endowments, charitable foundations, or family trusts, and several have recently asked us what big recommendations we'd make for their institution's investing process.

Thank you to the hundreds of readers who submitted their estimates for the probability of a stock market crash over the coming year - though the data we received wasn't quite what we were expecting.

Is a stock market crash just around the corner? It's a question on a lot of investors' minds these days - in this note, we'll explore a few different approaches to answering this question, including a detailed explanation of our favorite.

There's a lot of leverage in the US stock market right now, and it raises an interesting question: when does it make sense to borrow so you can own more stocks than the value of your wealth?

A "money pump" is a process that extracts money from a person with strange preferences and transfers it to the pumper in a nearly sure way. No one would want to be subject to a money pump, yet the target would find himself making choices he'd be quite happy with.

Twenty of the most influential voices in personal finance converge on a unified message: successful financial decision-making requires discipline, humility, and knowing that complexity is the enemy.

A number of clients have asked us about a recent Buttonwood column describing the "Permanent Portfolio" strategy. Are appealing returns enough to override the basics of asset allocation?

What happens when brilliant minds clash on the facts? Nobel Prize winner Robert Aumann reveals his groundbreaking mathematical proof that rational people with the same basic assumptions cannot agree to disagree - and what this means for markets, conflict, and human cooperation.

We steer our financial course through life choosing how much to spend and how to invest what's left, periodically updating our choices as circumstances evolve. It's a pretty simple problem to put into words, but finding an optimal solution has occupied some very bright minds since Harry Markowitz got the ball rolling 60 years ago.

One of the most common questions we get at Elm is how we determine what asset classes qualify for inclusion in the Risky and Safe asset buckets in our portfolios and recently launched ETF. To explain our thinking, we've outlined the six criteria that every asset class must pass. Risky Assets For a risky asset class to be included in Elm portfolios it has to have all of the following characteristics: Low cost: It has

To what extent has the exceptional US stock market performance been due to US companies riding a strong wave of real GDP growth to generate exceptional earnings growth?