[This portfolio review about buying bonds may contain affiliate links at no cost to you] The U.S. stock market has had a good year so far. Sure, there have been some dips like the ones in February and April but the results YTD are positive. On the flip side, bonds and international stocks haven’t been so lucky. That means investors with a tilt towards those asset classes have been buying bonds and international stocks. Both asset classes were underweight in my portfolio last month. It’s easy to see why if you look at the YTD results. The above breakdown is from Personal Capital which I recently started using to track…

The stock market today is an interesting one. Investors have benefited from a nearly uninterrupted run up this decade. That’s why it almost seemed out of character to see the small stumble this year. The stock market can fall? What madness is this? January started off strong with the S&P 500 returning over 5%. However, February wasn’t as rosy with nearly a 4% drop and March continued that trend with the S&P 500 dropping another 3%. This quick turn into negative land didn’t make many people happy as it brought to mind the risk that comes with investing in stocks. That’s especially true if investors bought anything near the January…

China Trade Wars : Episode IX Welcome to the ongoing saga of the China trade wars. On today’s episode, we look at my portfolio and see how much it has fallen! The last few months in the stock market have definitely been interesting. These months seem out of the norm because of the rather easy road we’ve had in the past few years. It’s easy to forget that the market can have negative returns when so much has gone right in the past decade. There was some volatility since 2008 but it was all relatively short lived. That means the fact that 2018 started off with a negative quarter seems…