John Rekenthaler

Index funds delivered as promised.

The situations of the Yale Endowment Fund and most individual investors are worlds apart.

Considering the possibility of a new investment paradigm.

How to do something different, without doing something bad?

Clues from the largest-company lists.

Let's take one more look at the "gold shares or bullion" question.

What’s more, the two are drifting even further apart.

The answer depends upon the size of the investment.

Should equity investors consider holding less of the former and more of the latter?

The investment hope is to sell them to greater fools.

Will it stay that way?

Several decades later, the answer has not yet arrived.

Putting numbers to the thesis

Vanguard's founder didn't see the need for them, and the markets haven't shown reason to suggest he was wrong.

The four stages of (most) bear markets.

The bear market that arrived in silence.

A few companies feast, while many beg.

Here's how insuring with stock-index put options works.

Now is the time to be creative.

The better approach: Survive as a bear, profit as a bull.

Little indeed: When the going got tough, diversification did not get going.

Going where no Treasury notes have gone before.

Expect more stock market volatility in the coming weeks (and maybe months).

For the most part, yes.

Global governments have no choice but to risk a recession.

Discretion can be the better part of valor.

The timing is suspect, but the concept may eventually make sense.

Their scraps aren't necessarily nutritious.

When the expected return is not clearly positive.

Fidelity's "study" rings true, whether it exists or not.

Revisiting a 25-year old suggestion.

They have quietly acquired huge powers--and responsibilities.

Beware of promises that cannot be fulfilled.

Whatever the answer, defined-contribution plans will feature in the solution.

These days, the statistic's interpretation is taken more figuratively than literally.

They can guess, but they do not know.

Ensuring that the plane can stay aloft.

The attacks have been directed at the wrong target.

The time is right, even if the politicians aren’t yet ready.

The plans are as good as they can be under the current framework--and that's not good enough.

Ben Graham's analogy is beguiling but inaccurate.

Yes, but with a very large asterisk.

The quiet attributes of slow-growth businesses.

Freedom is just another word for an emotion left to lose.

A fund that shouldn’t succeed, but does.

Another tool for understanding stock funds.

Volatility, size, and momentum, say Morningstar's quantitative researchers.

Gradually, its inefficiencies are being competed away.

Yet they will not become extinct.

As does being careful when interpreting charts.