When you have long-term financial goals, such as helping pay for a child’s college education or funding your retirement, including stock investments in your portfolio provides opportunities for potential growth. But should you invest in individual stocks or stock mutual funds?1 What’s the Difference? When you invest in individual stocks, you are buying a small […]
Investment Tips
Help if You Want It: Lessons From Your Account Statement
An account statement can provide investors with a wealth of information about their investments. How closely do you look at your brokerage account statement? Your statement can tell you a lot about your investments. The following key elements of your statement contain important information that can help you assess the health of your portfolio. Account […]
Charting a Long-Term Course
Stock market volatility can be a wild ride. If you follow the daily price movements of a stock market index, it’s enough to make you dizzy at times. If you watch the same index’s performance over longer periods, however, you may notice that things tend to smooth out. Unless you’re close to retiring and will […]
What to Know About Target-Date Funds
Learn how target-date funds can be a useful part of your retirement portfolio. Target-date funds are a relatively simple and convenient way to invest for a long-term goal. They can be particularly useful to investors who feel they lack the expertise or the time to invest their retirement savings effectively or to monitor their portfolios […]
Not All Bonds Are Alike
Before adding bonds to your portfolio, it’s important to know some basics about how they work and the significant variations that exist among bonds. What follows is an overview. Bond Basics Bonds are essentially IOUs, issued by federal, state, and municipal governments as well as by corporations and governmental agencies. They are intended to raise […]
Switching Investments
Your retirement plan gives you the flexibility to change your investment choices if you consider it appropriate to do so. When does it make sense to add or subtract from your holdings in one or more funds in your plan account? Here are some times when you might consider making a switch. When Your Retirement […]