Equal-Weight vs. Cap-Weight: A Different Way to Own the S&P 500
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,…
Guide
Practical, no-fluff walkthroughs for retail investors — how to actually use a broker’s tools, read an earnings report, size a position, or build a repeatable process instead of guessing. Written from real trading experience, not marketing copy.
The Most Traded Stocks by Dollar Volume: Bloom Energy Traded 25% of Its Value in One Day, Sandisk 12%
Friday, September 18 turned over $791 billion, nearly double a normal day. Bloom Energy traded 25% of its own value and Sandisk 12%, while Nvidia and Apple barely registered on that measure. Here is what…
ETF Expense Ratios: What 0.20% Actually Costs You Over 20 Years
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 Sector P/E Map: Auto Makers at 52, Insurers at 10, and Everything Between
Industry groups run from auto makers at 52.4 times earnings to property and casualty insurers at 9.7. We mapped 30 groups, and in several the average hides the stocks behind it. Tesla alone lifts autos,…
Building a Three-Fund Portfolio Inside a 401(k) With a Limited Menu
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%…
REIT ETFs vs. Owning Real Estate Directly
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…
One-Year Winners and Losers Among 293 Large Caps: Sandisk +1,653%, Boston Scientific -56%
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…
QQQ’s Top 10 Holdings Are Almost Half the Fund. Here’s Why That Matters.
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,…
Revenue Growth Leaders: Sandisk +372%, Micron +346%, and What Sits Behind the Top
Sandisk’s revenue rose 372% and Micron’s 346% in their latest quarters, on a list of 286 stocks where the median grew 13.3%. We ranked the top twelve and checked how much is one memory cycle,…
The 60/40 Portfolio Isn’t Dead. It Just Needs an Update.
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…