The final piece of inflation data for February came this morning. We seem to be stuck on a 4% inflation rate. This post displays a table and four graphs that I use to see the trends in inflation.

The two most widely-reported measures

Warren Buffet has the best, longest record of stock picking in history. Berkshire Hathaway (BRK), a closed-end mutual fund in effect, outperformed the S&P 500 by eight percentage points per year for 40 years. But in the last 15, BRK has trailed the S&P 500

Last week I realized I had not read a recent SPIVA® scorecard report that compares the performance of Active funds to their benchmark index. My prior post on a detailed report was in 2018. I was not looking forward to reading the latest report because

I liked this article, “Index Funds’ True Advantages.” The author took a sample of 15 Index Funds and 15 low-cost Active funds and compared them over 15 years. While this is a very small sample – much smaller than the universe of funds examined

I never owned international stocks before I decided on my retirement portfolio in December 2014. I chose to hold 70% US stocks and 30% international stocks for Patti and me. (Our mix is 85% stocks and 15% bonds; see Chapters 8 and 11, Nest Egg

Inflation data for January came out last week and a final piece came this morning. Inflation upticked in January. The picture looks different from last month: I thought we were on track to 2% annual inflation. The January result throws that view out the

I briefly mentioned in this post that the -25% real return for bonds for 2022 was the worst in history and the past two years have also been the worst in since 1926. I provide more detail and perspective in this post as to how

Last week I decided to test run TurboTax to file my 2022 tax returns. I was lured by Fidelity’s offer of FREE federal and state tax return. I completed all the entries into TurboTax this week, and this post recounts my experience: it took me

I’ve had a local tax preparation firm prepare my tax return for many years. As I think about it, I pay them A LOT relative to our investment costs. I’m going to complete my return in TurboTax this year. I’ll see how it goes. I

Today we got the second set of measures of inflation for December: the data of Personal Consumption Expenditures – the measure favored by the Federal Reserve. I show two graphs of the trends. One shows the last six months have been at an annual rate