I owe a great debt to many other authors and teachers who have helped me understand investing. One of my favorites is John Bogle, founder and former chief executive officer of the Vanguard Mutual Fund Group.

I recommend John’s “The Little Book of Common Sense Investing” to anybody interested in successful long-term investing through index funds. I quote this book often because it does a great job of teaching simple lessons that are invaluable to any investor who wants to rise above mediocrity.

Today I offer four lessons from John’s book, with permission from John Wiley & Sons, the publisher of “The Little Book of Common Sense Investing” (and publisher of my own book, “Live It Up without Outliving Your Money!”).

Lesson One: Control what you can. Investing involves many facets, most of which are beyond the control and even the influence of us common investors. But one thing you can control, at least to a great extent, is how much you pay for somebody to manage your money for you. Expenses, in other words. Index funds are much less expensive to buy and to own than actively managed funds.

Everybody’s a genius in a bull market, the old saying goes, but a bear market creates fear, uncertainty and costly mistakes.

The conventional definition of a bear market is a decline in prices of 20 percent or more, lasting at least two months. Whether Wall Street is in a bear market right now depends on what is being measured. But there’s no question this market has unsettled many investors.


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Director of Alternative Investments

Do commodities have a rightful place in a broadly diversified portfolio? The obvious answer seems to be yes, they do. However, after a lot of careful study and thought we have concluded that the right answer is still no, they don’t.

Commodity prices across the board are at all time highs.  Experts say the world is running out of natural resources and that production will not keep up with the rising demand from fast growing emerging economies. 

From a portfolio point of view, commodities also have attractive characteristics.  While commodity prices are quite volatile, they tend to zig and zag independently of stock and bond prices.  Due to the uncorrelated price movements, adding a small amount of commodity exposure can actually lower overall portfolio risk for a given expected return. 

At our workshops, we do our best to present some of the finest investing material you’ll find anywhere. But sometimes, one-on-one help is really what is needed.