Knowledge Base
Tax strategy, healthcare before Medicare, the post-FIRE identity shift, and the financial decisions that get more complicated after you stop earning.
1054 articles — page 26 of 88
Moody's and S&P use different rating scales, different methodological anchors, and different weighting systems that produce divergent assessments on roughly 50-60% of rated corporate bonds. For investors managing $5M+ fixed income allocations, those divergences are not a nuisance to reconcile. They
The honest answer: top-quartile venture capital funds have historically beaten the S&P 500 by a wide margin. Median VC funds have not. According to Cambridge Associates, top-quartile funds have generated net IRRs in the 15–25% range over long horizons, while the S&P 500 has delivered roughly 10% ann
Every S&P 500 rebalance announcement sets off a predictable chain of forced buying and selling across thousands of funds simultaneously. With over $5 trillion benchmarked to the index, according to Morningstar, even a single addition or deletion can move hundreds of millions of dollars in a matter o
The S&P 500's year-over-year price change is one of the most cited numbers in finance and one of the most misread. For a FATFIRE portfolio, the gross nominal return is almost irrelevant. What matters is the after-tax, inflation-adjusted figure, and for top-bracket investors that number is materially
The NYSE vs S&P 500 distinction is one of the most commonly conflated in finance, and getting it wrong has real portfolio consequences. The NYSE is a stock exchange, a marketplace where securities are bought and sold. The S&P 500 is a market index, a statistical measure tracking 500 selected large-c
The S&P 500 equal weight index holds the same 500 companies as the standard index but assigns each one a fixed weight of approximately 0.2%, regardless of size. Apple and a mid-cap industrial carry identical influence. According to S&P Dow Jones Indices, the top 10 holdings in the cap-weighted versi
The NASDAQ vs S&P 500 historical returns debate has a clear answer on raw numbers: the NASDAQ wins, often by a wide margin. But that headline obscures a more complicated story about drawdowns, concentration risk, tax drag, and entry-point dependency that matters enormously when you're allocating a $
S&P 500 rolling returns reveal something point-to-point measurements never can: the full distribution of outcomes across every historical entry point. Based on data going back to 1926, every single 20-year rolling return period has been positive. Not most of them. All of them. That single fact shoul
S&P events move markets in predictable, calendar-driven windows. For investors managing eight-figure portfolios, that predictability is an edge. Index reconstitutions force billions in coordinated institutional trades. Credit rating actions trigger mandatory selling from constrained funds. Each crea
The S&P 500 requirements set a hard floor that excludes roughly 98% of all U.S. publicly traded companies. As of 2024, the minimum unadjusted market capitalization threshold sits at $14.5 billion, up from $12.7 billion in 2023. That number alone tells you this is not a passive list of large companie
The S&P 500 correlation matrix is a 500x500 grid of Pearson correlation coefficients, each measuring how closely two stocks move together over a defined period. Values run from -1 (perfect inverse relationship) to +1 (perfect lockstep movement), with 0 indicating no linear relationship. In practice,
The S&P 500 and dollar correlation is one of the most misunderstood relationships in macro investing, and getting it wrong at scale is expensive. The short version: the two assets tend to move inversely during normal market conditions, but that relationship breaks down precisely when you need it mos