How to Become a Better Investor

Each week, the Stokes Family Office staff puts together a list of our favorite news and updates on financial planning, portfolio construction, tax and estate planning, retirement plan services and/or anything we found interesting. Enjoy this week’s curated list for your weekend reading!

📙 HOW TO BECOME A BETTER INVESTOR: AVOID STRESS

Joachim Klement | Klement On Investing

This provides an obvious, but important lesson. If you want to become a better investor, make sure you are not stressed when you make investment decisions. And that means turning off financial TV like Bloomberg or CNBC which are designed to stress you with a constant barrage of ‘alerts’. Similarly, social media groups, message boards, and social media influencers do only one thing. They want to keep you engaged for as long as possible and the best way to do that is to bombard you with content, stressing you out in the process. Click here to read more.

📘 BONDS’ PAIN IS RETIREES’ GAIN

John Rekenthaler | Morningstar

One of my salient memories as a mutual fund analyst came when interviewing a bond-fund manager in 1994 after that year’s fixed-income “massacre.” (Little did we know: Compared with bonds’ recent thrashing, that was a sandbox tussle). Other portfolio managers bemoaned the capital losses. Not Dan Fuss. He celebrated his fund’s prospects. Now it could offer high yields, for a long time. And it did. Each year over the next decade, Loomis Sayles Bond LSBRX paid at least 7% of its assets as income. That occasion reinforced what can easily be forgotten during bear markets: From investment troubles arise opportunities. Click here to read more.

Want to hear more from our team? Check out the Lagniappe Podcast. 

Have a great weekend!