u/FinePersonalFinance

Source: Realtor.com

Source: SmartAsset

Retirement account balances by income and gender in the U.S. in 2025

Source: Vanguard

State Street launches Nasdaq 100 ETF - QNDX. Currently has a lower fee than QQQ and QQQM.

QNDX | .10%  
QQQ | .18%  
QQQM | .15%

Will you be changing your ETF to QNDX?

Comcast announced plans to separate its media and tech businesses into two companies

Top 50 best places to work - employers with more than 5,000 employees

Source: Forbes

The investing world is filled with bright ideas that work until they don’t—usually after they’ve been sold to us as a fund. 
 
Often the best thing to do is shrug and move on, but a factor that beat the market for decades is worth revisiting. At a time when a handful of large companies dominate most portfolios, the “small-stock premium” is due for a comeback. 
 
By the time the premium was written about in the early 1980s, a dollar invested in the smallest tenth of U.S. companies by size would have earned an investor about 11 times as much as one in the large cap S&P 500 over 53 years. Lately, though, the heavyweight index has trounced small caps. 
 
Part of the problem might be how we define the category. “Not all small cap is created equal,” says Christine Wang of asset manager Bridgeway.
 
Wang and colleague Andrew Berkin asked what would happen if you owned an index of small stocks frozen in time. They excluded those that used to be in a larger-stock category and got demoted, or those that entered the market through an initial public offering. Both are known to be poor investments as a group.
 
The results were surprisingly good. Applying their approach to rolling periods of three years by only owning stocks that were small at the outset improved annual returns by 1.57 percentage points annually.
 
Their paper outlining the method is titled “I Know What You Did Last Summer” because that’s when the leading small-cap index, the Russell 2000, has been rebalanced each year, promoting some stocks and demoting others. Wang and Berkin created their own small cap measure and looked at 60 years of data.
 
The Russell 2000’s simplicity, being based only on size, causes it to include lots of junky companies—great in a bull market but less-so over the long term. Index funds “don’t come without baggage,” says Wang.
 
Many funds, active and semiactive, claim they have a way to beat that benchmark by focusing on things like value, quality or free cash flow. It’s likely that they wind up avoiding some of the same stocks that Wang and Berkin’s study did.
 
But lots of savers prefer the cheapest, simplest passive funds. It still pays to think about how they’re built. The S&P Small Cap 600 and Russell 2000 both measure the same category of companies, but S&P’s less-followed index requires them to be profitable before they enter its benchmark. 
 
That excludes some amazing small drug and tech companies. It also weeds out lots of duds. Over the past 30 years, the S&P 600 has had a cumulative total return 600 percentage points higher than the Russell 2000.
 
It pays to read the active ingredients, not just what’s on the label.