Bob French, CFA

Investing is deceptively simple. Until it’s not. As investors, we want to start with the market portfolio-that is, by definition, the most efficient portfolio. But we’ll also want to customize our investments to address our specific situation. For instance, the global bond market is substantially bigger than the global stock market, but most retirement-focused investors’…

WHAT IS OCCAM’S RAZOR? Occam’s Razor is a principle attributed to William Occam, a 14th-century philosopher. He stressed that explanations must not be multiplied beyond what is necessary. Thus, Occam’s Razor is a term used to “shave off” or dismiss superfluous explanations for a given event. This concept is largely ignored within the investment management…

Risk is a tricky concept to pin down in the investing world. There’s no good definition of what it truly is, or how people relate to it. And it’s – by far – the most important concept in finance. The Challenge of Defining Risk Finance isn’t alone in not being able to define key concepts, though…

It’s important to you and your investments that you understand the basics of how indexes and index funds work. What Is an Index Anyway? In the words of Lewis Carroll, let’s “begin at the beginning” with a simple definition. An index keeps track of returns generated by a basket of securities, and it’s put together…

Inflation is a fact of life. It’s also not so great for retirees. In fact, it’s one of the biggest risks that retirees face. By constantly eating away at the value of our savings and income, inflation will slowly reduce our purchasing power in retirement – if we don’t do anything about it. To put this…

The financial media loves to talk about interest rates. There are a lot of good reasons for this, but two of the big ones are that interest rates are really important, and they’re relatively understandable and have a direct connection to most people’s lives. They are tied to the mortgage rate you can get, the…

Everyone always talks about investing (and planning) for the long term. But they’re usually vague about what the “long term” actually means. Does that mean 5 years? 10 years? More? (Spoiler: the answer is definitely more). And frankly, talking about how you need to focus on the long term can feel like a bit of…

Almost everyone knows that they need to invest their money to help prepare for retirement. It’s one of the keys to getting where you want to go. The markets may (ok, they will) bounce around in the short term, but over the long term, they have done very well for disciplined investors. But why have markets been…

Financial markets are constantly on the move, and those moves can have serious implications for what your retirement will look like. Still, most people don’t really have any clue as to why the markets move the way they do. They see it as some dark alchemy, or at best, essentially random. In the long run, though,…