Retirement Insights

Which Makes More Sense for Retirees: A Total-Return or Income Portfolio?

By Wade Pfau, Ph.D., CFA, RICP®

Total-return investing focuses on building diversified portfolios from stocks and bonds to seek greater long-term investment growth. By focusing on total return, the objective over the long run is to produce a greater and steadier amount of income relative to what could be obtained by investing for income by focusing solely on interest and dividends to…

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Occam’s Razor: One of the Most Successful Active Managers of All Time Shows Why Active Management Doesn’t Work

By Bob French, CFA

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 landscape. This newsletter…

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2017 – Q1 Quarterly Market Review

By McLean Asset Management

This report features world capital market performance and a timeline of events for the last quarter. It begins with a global overview, then features the returns of stock and bond asset classes in the US and international markets. The report also illustrates the performance of globally diversified portfolios and features a topic of the quarter.…

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Indexes 101, Part 3: The Birth and Evolution of Index Investing

By McLean Asset Management

  According to legend, a pharmacist by the name of John Pemberton was looking for a cure for the headache when he first tried blending Coca leaves with Cola nuts. Pemberton couldn’t have known this recipe would eventually reach the heights of fame, even though Coca-Cola® never ended up achieving his original goal. This story…

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4 Ways to Manage Sequence of Returns Risk in Retirement

By McLean Asset Management

Sequence of Returns Risk, or Sequence Risk for short, is the risk that you will need to take distributions from your investment portfolio during periods when the market has recently declined. Taking distributions when the market has gone down effectively “costs” more than at other points in time as you are forced to sell at…

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Review: Investors flock to ‘macro’ hedge funds, but not only the old guard

By McLean Asset Management

Looks like certain hedge funds are back in style now. With the constant conveyor belt of hot new investments, as soon as something starts to lose its luster, there’s always something ready to take its place. This time, at least according to the article, it’s macro hedge funds. Macro hedge funds are basically hedge funds that…

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Review: 11 ways to reduce next year’s tax bill

By McLean Asset Management

Hopefully you’ve been able to close the books on last year’s taxes by now. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore them for another year. Now’s the time to make sure that you are doing everything you can to minimize your taxes in the future. This article has some suggestions on how to make sure…

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What is the Stock Market?

By McLean Asset Management

The stock market is confusing. When you talk about it, people tend to nod their heads sagely and make bland comments, like they do with most things relating to the economy. We know it’s important, and most of us hope it will provide us the retirement we want – but we don’t actually understand it,…

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Indexes 101, Part 2: Why So Many Indexes?

By McLean Asset Management

Remember when the financial media was positively giddy over the fact that the Dow Jones hit 20,000 points earlier this year (and we weren’t so impressed)? In part one of this series, we looked at what exactly the “points” measure in market indexes (not always what you might expect, as it turns out). Today, I…

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