galtjo

Close to a third of these people believe they lack the knowledge to invest.

Other people prefer super-safe investments like a checking account or have too much debt they have to take care of first.
..

Public schools are focused on pronouns not financial literacy.

The damage is incalculable.

@witrakw The short term debt. Your reply was a 1000X more political than his quote. Typical lefty trope.

@thedoc5350 If your comment would have been published on April 1st, I would have printed it and framed it on my wall.

@ActiveTrader007 gee, Perfesser, what amazing insights! Please keep these incredible contributions coming...

@Bgraham75 I get it, no Republican ever added to the debt? Shouldn't we be a little more of a team and not say things the last 50 years have not proven true? Or the last few years? #45 did not resolve any debt problems...

As usual, democrats recklessly spend and screw up the US debt structure and left the adult Conservatives holding the bag to clean up their mess.

For index/etf investors they should just ABB(Always Be Buying). Set a weekly or monthly auto buy direct from your checking into your investment acct and let it do its thing. Forget about this "very aggressive dip buying" nonsense. Set up a weekly or monthly buying amount and let it do its thing on SCHD.

@darnoc111

Well aware of that. Carter was a disaster over the first few years in office. Did some good things late in term including appointing Volcker, and deregulating the freight, airline and natural gas pipeline industries. Of course, he also birthed FEMA and the Department of Education late in term as well. Both of which should be disbanded imho

@Bgraham75 That's why people told me they would have bet on massive capital outflows if Harris had won

Boy did Biden/Harris leave a huge mess behind for others to clean up....

This piece appears way too broad as dgro is actually a good fund with a good long term record. I own a small position.
Instead of issuing such a broad admonition as "shouldn't own it" maybe he could write don't buy at the current level or dollar cost average currently. Or an investor can just place it on a watchlist and wait for the next inevitable correction. With respect to the author's claim that its technology holdings make it less attractive. That is silly talk. Every investor that is holding for more than a year or two needs to hold technology and dgro holds what I consider to be a resonable level of technology.
I chose dgro over schd years ago and continue to be confident I made the right decision.

@Toby wrote:

"Be your own investment manager using the stocks that these funds hold. No management fees."

No cash management fees, but you will have to consume more of your own time, which is also a cost.

@Diamond-Hands Agree. If one adopts 30 to 50 of them as he postulates you will be full time. I prefer to diversify my bets in this base sector with ETFs as allocations are different and concentrate my research time on positions and/or opportunities with higher upside. Each to his own and wishing success for all who do their homework.

@galtjo perfect thank you for adding what you have done, I appreciate the helpfulness of this community, especially “don’t check the balance every week” lol but that is a tough habit to break :).

Fair valuation and a decent yield on dividend king PEP, adding shares.

@Sungarden Investment Publishing a Chart won‘t tell me either if a Company is cheap or not. Fundamentals do. And if a stock (chart) goes down how does one know it goes further down? Same logic or not?

Just to be clear, Elon just posted on X some of the things on the first spending bill and when people saw that, they reacted big time.

To be honest, I was super surprised at some of the stuff - and I would NEVER approve any of it... and I don't think most Americans would either.

The most impactful policy on inflation will be lowering petroleum costs. Over 6000 products use petroleum as a key ingredient. These include aspirin, tires (1 gal/tire), nylon, polyester, asphalt & plastic capsules for our drugs. An EV without petroleum would simply be a piece of metal without an interior and without tires. Then there is fuel costs for transporting ALL our products.
Believe Trump is trying to improve economy by allowing more people to keep their money & spend/save it rather than give it to an inefficient govt. Remember my economics degree talked about the “MULTIPLIER” effect which states, in common terms, during good economies people spend more and each $ they spend is multiplied by a factor of X.
Example: u, and others, buy new TV from Walmart u wouldn’t have bought during tough times. Walmart therefore buys more TVs from the manufacturers which causes them to buy more components from their suppliers, etc. So each of your $ is going through the economy several times and maybe they hire more people.
I “BELIEVE” that’s why the government actually collected more revenue when Trump reduced taxes and why JFK first suggested reducing the highest marginal tax rates (90%+) in 1960’s.
The economic pie gets bigger and more people win in MHO.

Great article and analysis. My issue is I like to hold about 5 ETF/ETNs. So I like a strategic combo of lets say SCHD, XLE, QQQM, XLK, GLDI. In my scenario it is a positive that SCHD, XLE and GLDI hold an absolute minimum of tech or growth stocks. That way I can slowly reallocate the percentages in my portfolio in case of a big recession. What would be interesting is to take out the growth/tech stocks in VFLO and to compare the numbers on the regular stocks that are left in it to SCHD which are all value stocks. Let me put it even simpler with an example. If SCHD was the same but happened to have held Nvidia at 20% the last two years it would have outperformed any of the funds listed here but I would NOT hold it because of the risk.....OR if I held it I would adjust the amount of NVDA I held as a single stock or XLK which has a top NVDA holding.

Another side note, I tend NOT to like Financials or REITS, so when I have to find a great value ETF that does not contain a larger percentage of any of those, it really narrows the list of good quality ETFs. Recently I have reduced healthcare type stocks just in case RFK/Trump do get to implement this health initiative in the US. Good luck to all investors, and please keep posting great articles like this and commenting. I gain so much from SA.

@prema_donna The political platform Harris is running on should scare every American. Price controls, higher taxes, open borders, giving free benefits to illegal immigrates. These positions will devastate the US economy. A invasion of Taiwan is much more likely which will directly affect the chip industry and nvidia. In this case, politics matter.