I’m always a little surprised when people talk about active and passive management as if it’s an either/or question. At Vanguard, we believe the right conjunction¹ is not or. It’s and. Both active and passive strategies have earned spots in your clients’ portfolios. 

The concept of “investing success,” as it often appears in the media, is a tangled web to me. Every time I read something about the topic,I can’t help feeling that the authors are confusing two very different efforts:investment success and investor success.

While the title may raise a few eyebrows given the equity market’s rocky start to 2016, its inspiration is Glenn Frey, the legendary singer-songwriter for the Eagles, who passed away on January 18, 2016. “Take itEasy,” cowritten by Frey, was the Eagles’ first single and one of their biggesthits. As an Eagles fan, I headlined this post with the song’s title both to pay tribute to the great Glenn Frey and to capture my thoughts about recent market turbulence and the danger of extrapolating too much information from a month of performance.

World economies will remain very fragile until the debt-deleveraging of the global private sector is completed. The global economy will move toward a more balanced and healthier equilibrium.  As a result, the developed economies such as the United States and Western European countries should contribute more toward global growth than they have in nearly two decades.  For these reasons Austin Capital’s view is a world economy in deceleration not a short term stagnation.

My fifteen-year-old son has become obsessed with the show Jeopardy! Every night as my family prepares to eat dinner, I can hear it on the TV in the background. The answer-and-question format has made me think about alternative ways to talk about ETFs. So much of what is said about ETFs still seems to be a clutter of misunderstanding, and I wish more clarity were brought to the conversation. If ETFs were one of the game’s categories, I imagine contestants (investors) could address the issues in the answer-and-question format, and it might even sound something like this (with my added commentary,if I were the show’s host).

My colleague recently explained how he moved from a furnished apartment to an unfurnished one, requiring him to get some furniture.He thought about renting because there was a chance he might move back into a furnished apartment sometime in the future. He decided to buy instead. How long he planned to stay in this apartment was a deciding factor. He calculated that the monthly costs of renting the furniture would exceed the upfront costs of buying the furniture at some point in the future.

It’s the time of year when many of us make an effort to do better—eat healthier, exercise more, try something new. As the holiday bills come rolling in, financial goals may be on your mind as well. In a recent message to clients, I touched on a few investing resolutions to keep in mind this year.None of these resolutions will come as a surprise to our clients, but my hope is more investors will take these themes to heart in 2016 and stay focused on the aspects of investing they can control.

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about rising interest rates and what that means for bond investors.One “solution” (suggested mostly by active fund managers) is to use active management for the bond portion of your portfolio. The argument goes that active funds are better in a rising-rate environment because they can shorten their duration, reducing losses from rising rates. What they don’t point out is, for this strategy to work, the manager has to get four things right: when rates go up, how much rates go up, the shape of the yield curve, and when rates stop going up. A miss on any of the four can turn a possibly successful strategy into a losing one. That’s a lot of things to get right or, looked at another way, a lot of things that can go wrong.

When I joined Vanguard 29 years ago, the mutual fund industry was all about performance. The financial news media regularly lionized star fund managers such as Peter Lynch, John Neff, John Templeton, and Mario Gabelli, while fund companies touted past performance figures and Morningstar star ratings. Investors became conditioned to make fund purchase decisions based on performance.

Many of my clients ask me the age-old question of whether they should invest cash all at once or dollar-cost average over time. This decision can have a significant impact, so I’ll lay out some key considerations I review with my clients.

Reflecting on National Save for Retirement Week, my co-workers and I have been thinking a lot about those close to or in retirement. However, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that our advice might actually be more helpful to folks at the beginning of the journey than those approaching their retirement destination. There are more of these folks than you may imagine; millennials have surpassed the population of baby boomers,according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Yet too often this is a generation forgotten. So, I asked one of my colleagues, Zoe Odenwalder, a 20-something millennial herself, to provide a few suggestions to make the trip to retirement a more relaxing one. Read Zoe’s unique insight below.

As the holidays approach, I begin to evaluate my clients’ portfolios and look for year-end opportunities. Here’s a list of 6 financial to-do’s to check off before year-end to ensure that you’re not leaving anything on the table.

Somewhere nestled amid the shuffle of Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve is a day that reminds us to consider giving back during the holiday season—Giving Tuesday, the Tuesday after Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So in the spirit of Giving Tuesday and of course my passion for helping others to make smart financial decisions, I’d like to share a recent personal experience that illustrates how you can give smart with your heart.

A few years ago, while buying wine for a friend’s party, I found a reasonably priced cabernet sauvignon produced by Bogle Vineyards. I work at Vanguard. How could I resist? A clerk assessed my selection and, I kid you not, pronounced it a “good value.”

It’s October 1985, and Marty McFly, hero of “Back to the Future Part II,” catches a ride in a decade-hopping DeLorean time machine and goes three decades into the future. Leaving his hometown, Hill Valley of 1985,with Doc and girlfriend Jennifer, he arrives at a considerably different Hill Valley of 2015. If the movie were reality, the teenage Marty might be a bit disappointed in the here and now—no power-lacing sneakers, no flying hover boards, no “Jaws 19,” and no self-drying clothes.

When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. My grandmother repeated that to me innumerable times, and I think it might be a very relevant thought as unsettled financial markets and the year-end seem set to collide. Many financial advisors review their clients’ portfolios at year-end with an eye on reducing clients’ tax bills through loss harvesting. The fact that there are losses is typically a somewhat bitter realization, but this situation may have a sweet side too. Let me explain.

We all know that inertia and procrastination are important behavioral biases and that they can undermine good long-term decisions. It’s easy to put off rewriting your will, exercising, dieting or, in the financial world, to put off saving more or rebalancing your portfolio. I should know—a lawyer suggested I update my will and related documents a year ago. Just last week, I replied to his email.