Recent posts by Craig Stock
Craig Stock heads Vanguard's Corporate Marketing and Communications department, responsible for delivering investor information and education in Vanguard’s "plain talk" style.
We humans are funny animals.
At times, I’ll scour the internet trying to find the cheapest airline flight, perhaps saving $100 or $200, and feeling quite pleased with myself for doing so.
On some other purchases, I confess, I do no comparison shopping at all. A recent example was in choosing countertops for a kitchen. We liked the product and the craftsman who would install it, and decided on the spot to go ahead. Perhaps we could have saved a bundle by shopping around. I’ll never know.
A Wall Street Journal report, published on February 21, notes that small-capitalization stock prices, as measured by the Russell 2000 Index, are nearing an all-time high. But investors aren’t pouring money into small-cap stocks.
The story, “Small-cap rise is big snooze,” notes that small-cap funds have seen steady net outflows of cash, not big inflows. “Where is the love?” asks the Journal.
As you probably know, Bill McNabb, our chairman and chief executive officer, spent part of Monday, January 23, interacting with Vanguard clients via social media—”taking over” our Twitter and Facebook channels.
“It’s not every day that a CEO reaches out to their client-base. The information has been valuable,” wrote one fan.
“Why not get social every day?” another fan commented.
There’s a good reason why regulators require financial firms to include, when mentioning the past returns or ratings of a mutual fund, the warning: “Past performance is not a guarantee of future results.”
The warning is true. History is an imperfect guide to the future, or historians would be fabulously wealthy investment sages.
But history does seem, if not to repeat, to rhyme from time to time. Read more »
I’ve been investing in stocks through mutual funds for more than 30 years. I’ve known all along that periodic swoons come with the territory. I’ve experienced the October 1987 crash, the 2000–2002 bursting of the tech-stock bubble, and the kerflop of stocks accompanying the 2007–2009 credit crisis and “Great Recession.”
Even so, it’s never easy to see a fall in stocks slice into one’s retirement portfolio. But if getting older has an upside, it’s that experience has taught me some coping mechanisms.