Come on...you don't recognize him?! His name is Jonathan Clements, and he's a personal finance columnist at the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Clements writes for that paper every Wednesday and also contributes an article for the Sunday edition that runs in many newspapers across the country, plus you can snag it if you subscribe to www.wsj.com. He is somewhat boring (although I like his dry sense of humor), and his advice is beyond middle-of-the-road conservative. Also, if you read his columns every week--as I do--and have read his books--the most recent of which I did, you'll notice he is fairly repetitive. Keep investment costs down, most people can't beat the market so don't bother and buy index funds, consistent adherence to an asset allocation strategy is more important than anything else. Yadda yadda yadda. And this is why I love this guy. He sticks to his guns year in and year out, and if you followed his advice, you'd probably be meeting the market...that's right, meeting the market. And what the hell is wrong with that when most investors, and most portfolio managers DON'T consistently beat or even meet the market over the long haul. I can't imagine the folks trying to sell WSJ advertising into the financial services sector care for Mr. Clements very much, but I sure like him. I've told my family to read his articles, my friends to read his articles, and now I'm telling you, the three readers of my blog, to read Jonathan Clements' articles. Buy his books. Send him a Starbucks card. Send John Bogle of Vanguard Investments a Starbucks card. OK...let's not get carried away. Whew!
Umm....not necessarily so, says Ben Stein. In a column in today's New York Times, Mr. Stein provides a lesson for our two Democratic presidential hopefuls -- that attacking the profitability of Big Oil ignores the fact that regular Americans like you and I benefit from their profits. We already own much of these companies through our holdings in index funds and actively traded mutual funds, which likely constitute the bulk of our 401K plan or defined benefit (i.e., pension) fund assets. Case in point: according to Morningstar, the #1 holding of the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index (Ticker: VTSMX) is ExxonMobil. A good read.
