Articles authored by Harry McDonald

Many people, when they start paying attention to investing, run into the same problem: the vocabulary is enormous, and nobody explains how the pieces fit together. Stocks, bonds, ETFs, mutual funds, CDs, money markets, private equity, venture capital… it sounds like a different language, and the financial world tends to assume you already know it. …

How this works (a quick one-time intro): Each week during earnings season we will begin to publish a short read on how S&P 500 companies are doing. It’s built from FactSet’s Earnings Insight report (John Butters), with index and market-cap data from YCharts, aggregated in-house. Every figure ties back to FactSet’s published numbers; we simply …

Interest rates are the price of money. They touch everything: your mortgage payment, the cost of a new car, how much the government pays to service its debt, and how investors value every stock in their portfolio. And right now, the Federal Reserve is staring at a set of circumstances that makes its job harder …

The smell of fresh-cut grass. The crack of a bat. The entirely unjustifiable $14 hot dog you talked yourself into before the third inning even started. Opening Day is here, and baseball is back. For the baseball faithful, Opening Day is the single most optimistic day of the calendar year. Every team is tied for …

In the world of portfolio construction, the classic 60/40 split, 60% equities and 40% bonds, has long been hailed as a balanced approach to weathering market storms. It’s like the reliable minivan of investing: not flashy, but designed to get you through various terrains with a mix of growth potential and stability. But what if …