Young People Freaked Out by the Market Act Accordingly - The Wallet - WSJ

Some interesting numbers in this article.  The numbers show that young people are starting to pay a lot more attention to their finances — which is always a good thing.  The really interesting part is that only 26% of the respondents had 401(k) accounts while only 17% had an IRA or Brokerage account.

What does this mean?  This reminds me of the Brady Bunch spoof movie a few years ago.  If you ever watched the original Brady Bunch, they always were out working on their bikes.  In the spoof movie one of the kids was out working on his bike.  Someone walks buy and asks how his bike riding was going (or something to that effect).  The Brady kid replied, “Oh, we don’t ride our bikes.  We just fix them.”

These numbers seem to reflect a similar situation.  People often seem to have good intentions about investing and savings but taking that next step to action is difficult.  That, or they just don’t realize that one of the best way for them to secure a secure financial future is to use their retirement accounts.

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Stock Picker Bill Miller’s Defeat - WSJ.com

Very interesting article a few months back on Bill Miller.  For years Bill Miller was one of the few “rock star” fund managers who seemed to defy those who said that you could not consistently beat the market.  Eventually the market caught up with him and wiped out all of those years of market-beating results.

“These losses have wiped away Value Trust’s years of market-beating performance. The fund is now among the worst-performing in its class for the last one-, three-, five- and 10-year periods, according to Morningstar.”

This market downturn has certainly caused me to rethink some of my former positions.  While I’m a firm believer in the Vanguard-way of thinking around low cost index funds, I still believed that there were those few who were able to defy the logic and beat the market — like Dodge and Cox funds.  Until now.  While I didn’t own any of Bill Miller’s Value Trust fund, I did own a chunk of 4 Dodge and Cox funds that have had similar results.  Now I’m considering moving to an index-only portfolio.

My favorite quote from the article:

“Why didn’t I just throw my money out of the window — and light it on fire?” says Peter Cohan, a management consultant and venture-capital investor who owns Value Trust shares.

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Originally uploaded by jed.taylor

We took a Sunday drive out in the country to look at those weird wind mills that we can always see from the road. This particular wind farm covers 22,000 acres and produces 396 megawatts with 240 turbines (1/2 of Illinois wind power). They made an eerie noise.

At one point the windmills looked as if they were about a mile away, when in fact they were actually about 10 miles away.  They are fun to visit, but I’m not sure how excited I would be to have to look at them all day long.