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Preparing for, and living in, retirement halfway is a dead end. The richest and most successful retirement experiences and outcomes occur when taking on life and activities full-circle. Thinking in completion mode inspires endless loops of satisfaction. Closure is an accomplishment. It allows you to move your life and those of others, forward. It allows others to do the same. Here are five circles to an enriching retirement.

In the vast majority of longer-term periods, history has shown that a stronger dollar has been better for U.S. equities than a weaker one. This article presents 2 charts that show the interaction between the U.S. dollar and equity prices to support the aforementioned conclusion. Words: 422

So you want to be rich? In order to join the millionaires’ club – and not get booted out because you went broke spending all your money – you’ve got to develop money smarts. The rich don’t stay rich by spending frivolously and being obsessed with beating the Joneses’. Here are some money management essentials you may want to keep in mind to master like the millionaires do.

The fact that margin debt is now in a downtrend and its relatively massive size suggests returns over the next three years will be very poor. In other words, based solely on this one measure, buying stocks today presents investors with a great deal of risk for very little potential reward.

Apple Inc.’s 15% YTD stock price fall could take a bite out of the reported earnings of the following 5 tech stocks.

One of the qualities that can make investing in the stock market so exciting is how fast it moves and reacts. Prices are constantly changing making it a challenge to keep up with what’s going on unless you’re sitting in front of a trading monitor. As a result, you might feel nervous about when to place trades, especially in uncertain market conditions. The good news is there are several easy steps you can take to better navigate your trading decisions during volatile markets. Here’s a look at some of the risks of volatile markets and a few ways to help you minimize losses.

I have long been a critic of government inflation statistics. Not so much with regard to the methodology they use, but because the measure of “average” inflation across the broad economy doesn’t really describe the inflation that the majority of Americans experience. I’ve written about that at length in several letters and now my good friend Ron Arnott, along with his associate Lillian Wu, presents us with a research paper that lays out what inflation actually looks like for most Americans – and the picture is not pretty.

Deutsche Bank’s catastrophic derivative exposure has hammered down its stock price from $135 in 2007 to only $17/share today - ergo a heart-stopping price loss of -87%. Furthermore, DB’s stock price appears to be hell bent for leather to follow Lehman Brothers’ lethal path to Wall Street’s graveyard due primarily to its oppressive derivative’s exposure. As Warren Buffett has said: “Derivatives are weapons of mass destruction.”

Precious metals have posted their best quarter in nearly 30 years and mining stocks are soaring from oversold multi-year lows. Those that were willing to buy when everyone else was selling have been handsomely rewarded in 2016 but we believe the gains are just getting started. In fact, gold would need to climb to somewhere around $3,000 per ounce to match the gains that gold experienced after bouncing from its prior bottoms and silver would need to climb towards $75 per ounce.

To most people, a depression means '30s-style conditions, and since they don't see that, they can't imagine a depression. That's because they know what the last depression was like, but they don't know what one is. It's hard to visualize something you don't understand...Nobody can predict with absolute certainty what this depression will be like...[but one] can be fairly well-assured it won't be an instant replay of the last one...To define the likely differences between this depres­sion and the last one, it's helpful to compare the situa­tion today to that in the early 1930s. The results aren't very reassuring.