Author: MI Research Team

Mutual funds have long been a staple for investors, offering instant diversification and the prospect of having a professional money manager in charge of your portfolio. But changes to the structure of investment vehicles, specifically the introduction of exchanged-traded funds (ETFs), have rendered the old-school mutual fund obsolete.

We all have a natural inclination to want the stock market to move higher. But counterintuitively, for the vast majority of investors, lower market prices will actually lead to higher account balances down the road. There are of course some exceptions, but more than likely you're about to find out why you've been spending your whole life hoping for the wrong outcome in the stock market.

With each and every investment that you make, you're going to be giving up one benefit in exchange for another. Most of the time, this trade-off is between risk and potential return. Understanding this trade-off at a conceptual level will go a long way in helping you to select the right investments (or strategies) on your path to retirement.

The unfortunate reality is that nothing in this world is certain. In fact, the only thing in life that is certain ... is that nothing is certain. This is especially true when we talk about money and investing. Since we can't deal with certainties, we're forced to deal with probabilities. Therefore, probabilities become the lens through which we must view all things investment related.

You've heard of the gender pay gap, but are you aware of the gender investing gap? Put simply, women do not invest to the same extent that men do. As a result, when retirement rolls around, women end up with only two-thirds as much money in their portfolios. This is a BIG problem, especially when you consider that women in the U.S. tend to live on average 6.5 years longer than their male counterparts.