Aricles: Buy & Hold


Evaluating new investment products
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April 27, 2011

We are always looking for ways to better design client investment portfolios. Every year, we are bombarded with new investment approaches, new products and new trading strategies to beat the market. Most new products can be tossed aside immediately, but a few require more detailed investigation.

Click here to read the article at Merriman.com

Inflation: Will your investments protect you?
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May 21, 2009
While inflation is currently quite low, there is concern about the potential for future higher inflation, due to the recent massive injections of liquidity into the financial system, and the huge ongoing federal government deficits.  

Federal Reserve officials would like to see annual inflation around 2 percent over the long run. Whether they could achieve this goal, even with all the tools at their disposal, remains to be seen.

Our Lazy Portfolio (as written about at MarketWatch.com)
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October 22, 2008

When is being lazy good? Ask MarketWatch columnist Paul Farrell.  Here are his portfolio suggestions, and how our portfolio stacks up against other buy and hold or "lazy" portfolios.

Lazy Portfolio Update

Don't Dump Those Dogs!
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September 22, 2008

It won’t surprise you to read that many of our clients have had a pretty tough time with the market this year. Over and over again, we hear from people who want to take action instead of sitting still. The three most common things people seem to want to do are:

•    Get out of the market immediately and go to cash.
•    Buy commodities and commodity funds.
•    Dump the “dogs” in their portfolios, the funds that have underperformed.

The perfect portfolio
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September 01, 2009
EDITOR'S NOTE:  Since 2003, one of the most popular articles at FundAdvice.com has been "The perfect portfolio" by Jeff Merriman-Cohen, our chief executive officer.  This article has now been updated to reflect investment results through 2008.
 
Great chefs know that it takes more than the right ingredients to make an outstanding stew. If you put everything together in just the right way, ordinary ingredients can turn into magic. In this article, Jeff Merriman-Cohen shows how the same thing is true for investing.
 
Four Buy-and-Hold Portfolios
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June 29, 2005

We’ve been managing money for clients since 1983, and the best way we have ever found to build a buy-and-hold portfolio is using no-load asset-class index funds managed by Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA). These funds were created to help investors pinpoint the most productive types of assets, as identified in academic research.

The Merriman Model Portfolio
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July 29, 2005

This all-equity portfolio represents what we believe is the very best way for investors to diversify their investments using mutual funds available to the public. It’s designed to provide exposure to the nine most important equity asset classes that we recommend. No single fund family, including Fidelity and Vanguard, has open funds in all nine.

Can buy-and-hold investors beat Vanguard?
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August 06, 1999
For serious buy-and-hold investors, asset allocation and diversification are by far the most important decisions. They are more important than selecting the right mutual funds and individual stocks. They are more important than exactly when you get into the market and when you finally exit.

Where's the "Total" in the Total Stock Market Fund?
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July 05, 2005

John Bogle, founder and retired chairman at Vanguard Group, has done a great deal for individual investors over the past 30 years.

What is Big? What is small?
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July 06, 2005

Sidebar to: In Stock Investing, Size Matters

In the stock market, "large-cap" and "small-cap" are insiders’ shorthand for a simple bit of mathematics that tells the overall value that investors place on various public companies.