Risk and Return

Vanguard's Total World Stock ETF is an elegantly simplistic product...but is simplicity costing you money?

Rather than worrying about IPO inclusion timing, investors would be better served focusing on the long-term expected returns of the markets they're invested in.

Regular readers know we've been evangelizing a unified approach to lifetime investing and spending for a long time, which is why we're so excited about the work Yale Professor James Choi is doing.

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 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?

U.S. stock buybacks are on track for a record in 2025 - but they also raise important questions.

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?

What do you stand to inherit? It still feels like a question from a different age, despite its growing importance today.

Bond markets are a valuable source of information about the future. If you believe in the wisdom of crowds - particularly when the crowd is big, has lots of money and tends to focus on cash flows rather than blithely extrapolating future returns from the past - then you'll want to know what the bond market crowd has to say.