Mara Lindqvist covers ETFs and portfolio construction for StockVane — index versus sector funds, asset allocation, and how to think about a 401(k) or IRA without overtrading it. She previously worked in financial planning before moving to full-time writing. Her articles are analysis and opinion, not personalized advice — see StockVane's Editorial Standards and Disclaimer.
Half in NVIDIA, half in Johnson & Johnson, trimmed yearly: $76,700 richer than doing nothing. Swap in Microsoft and the same rule cost $65,500. Five years of StockVane price data show when rebalancing pays and…
Ten stocks make up 40% of our 300-stock list by value. Equal weighting beat cap weighting by 20 points over 12 months, then tied it over six. A few outliers explain much of that gap,…
General Motors trades at 36.7 times trailing earnings and 7.1 times forward earnings. One $3.42 loss quarter drives the first, and the second needs about $10 billion of profit GM has never earned in the…
A 0.20% expense ratio takes $20 from a $10,000 fund in year one and about $1,409 by year 20. We ran a lump sum, steady contributions, five fee tiers and a $250,000 balance to show…
A plan menu decides what a 401(k) three-fund portfolio can hold. What you control is the fund for each role, the fallback when one is missing, and a rebalancing rule. A 0.03% and a 1%…
A six-REIT basket lost 37% in the month to March 23, 2020, and 39% from peak to trough by October 2022. A rental property showed none of it. The volatility gap between the two is…
Of 293 large caps, the median rose 23%, yet 25 more than doubled and 12 fell over 30%. Sandisk gained 1,653%; Boston Scientific lost 56%. What the tails share, where the list misleads, and the…
The ten largest Nasdaq names are worth $31.1 trillion, 39% of our 293 large caps. Over one year their cap-weighted gain was 39%, or 20% without Micron. Here is what that weighting means for QQQ,…
SPY sits 2.0% below its high, yet the median stock is 12.8% below its own and 89 of 295 are down 20% or more. Hypothetical math shows why the 60/40 split matters less than what…
Of the 300 largest U.S.-listed stocks we cover, 85 are foreign-domiciled. Their median one-year gain is 30.9% against 16.9% for U.S. names. What that does and does not say about skipping international funds, with the…