These days most companies offer some form of employee benefits. Among the most common are insurance plans (health/dental/vision), and if you’re lucky, a savings plan for retirement. 

When it comes to identifying what’s wrong with your investment portfolio, costs are probably not near the top of your list. But they should be!

In retirement, paying higher costs (through investment fees, expense ratios, and advisor fees) can reduce your income and overall balance, leaving you with less money to spend or pass on to your heirs.

In Part One of our series highlighting some of the glaring issues related to your investments, we talked about understanding what you’re invested in and why. In Part Two, we focused on what it meant to accurately measure how your portfolio is performing.

In Part One of our series on Why Your Investments Are Terrible, we talked about the importance of understanding what you’re invested in and why. Here, in Part Two, we’re focusing on performance.

Measuring your portfolio’s performance seems pretty straightforward. I mean, if your portfolio returns have gone up for the year that’s good and if they’ve done the opposite, that’s probably bad...right?

Remember the popular ad campaign that ended each of its commercials with the question, “What’s in your wallet?”

How could you not?! It was run like clockwork on every network at all times of the day.

But as often as you saw the commercials and perhaps even considered the contents of your wallet, chances are you probably overlooked a much more consequential question than credit card rewards.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a substantial uptick in questions on the subject of selecting individual stocks.

To be clear, our perspective is, if you’re picking individual stocks, it’s a lot like gambling. Sure you can win big, but the subsequent emotional rollercoaster can be as volatile as the prices of the underlying stocks.