Many investment advisers, financial planners, and others build their strategies around what is known as Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT). A basic understanding of MPT can be helpful to you, since your retirement plan, and other investing efforts are likely based, to some degree, around MPT.

Barry Ritholtz of Big Picture tweeted this morning an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal. People are complaining about Fidelity’s new commission free ETFs, because they charge an exit fee if you own them less than 30 days. If you’re a financial adviser, you must own the ETF for more than 60 days. Seriously, [...]

Barron’s magazine released their annual stock broker survey. This is the 18th annual ranking of online brokers. For 2013, Interactive Brokers gets the top pick again, now the leader for two years in a row.

One of the questions that gets asked quite a bit, especially as thoughts turn toward the future, is this: “Will I have enough to retire?” Deciding how much you need for a comfortable retirement is a personal decision. Here’s how you can check to see if you are on track for retirement:

Capital One announced effective March 1st 2013, it’s lowering the cost per trade for both pricing tiers within ShareBuilder. All of this is great news for existing or potential new ShareBuilder customers.

You’re probably familiar with the idea of factoring inflation into your retirement investment goals. You have to make certain that your portfolio will make a reasonable accommodation for inflation as of the date that you will retire.

The dividend discount model is one of the most traditional and conservative methods for valuing an individual stock. A dividend discount model, also known as the Gordon Growth Model, assumes that a stock is equal to the present value of all its future dividend payments.

Everyone works to amass the largest retirement portfolio they can. But how do you know that it will be big enough once you start withdrawing money for living expenses in retirement? There actually is no scientific answer to this question because it is an attempt to predict the future. However there is a convention, known [...]

There are many reasons to perform a 401(k) rollover to an IRA. Whether you are trying to improve your tax situation later on with the help of a Roth IRA, or whether you have changed employers (or left the rat race altogether), it’s worthing considering rolling over your 401(k).

Talk about inflation, and investors attention often turns to commodities. The conventional wisdom is that rising inflation turns commodities into winning investments. That can be true, but it depends on the type of commodity and on the type of inflation.