Advertisement TRENDING 1. UPDATE 1-Stablecoin USDC breaks dollar peg after revealing $3.3 bln Silicon Valley Bank exposure 2. What's a green bond? Behind the contract that sent Rivian stock sinking 3. ‘I got scammed’: Americans describe getting surprise medical bills via health care loopholes 5. Ohio train derailment: What we learned this week from the Norfolk Southern hearing Advertisement Recommended Stories MarketWatch Nikki Haley says she wants to raise Social Security’s full retirement...

Residential real estate has done it again: It rose during the February-March bear market. I’m referring, of course, to the average price of a U.S. home during the stock bear market earlier this year, during which the S&P 500 SPX, +0.84% fell 34%. Over the same period the benchmark Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index rose 1.0%. This index’s ability to hold its own during the bear markets is not a fluke. The index also rose in all but two of prior U.S. equity bear markets back to the...

Which of the many predictions for how the stock market will perform in 2020 should you pay attention to? None of them Truth is, it’s the rare new-year’s prediction that comes true. Moreover, most market analysts making these predictions don’t care if they’re wrong. Their intentions in making the predictions are instead to provoke or, more cynically, to attract attention to themselves. Imagine someone predicting that there is a slightly elevated chance of the U.S. market rising in 2020:...

20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved. Courtesy: Everett Collection Overconfidence is a big problem throughout the investment arena, not just among financial advisers. But advisers are particularly vulnerable to it, since their clients are eager to be told that their strategy will surely be successful. Since advisers naturally want to make their clients happy, they project greater confidence in their forecasts than is warranted. About such advisers you could say that they are often...

Repeat after me: The current bull market did not begin in March 2009. It’s important to repeat this over and over because almost all of the financial advisers I monitor believe that that’s when it did begin. If they’re right, and assuming it didn’t end in January at the market’s all-time high, the current bull market is the longest in U.S. history. But they’re wrong. As Humphrey Neill, the father of contrary analysis, insisted: “When everyone thinks alike, everyone is likely to be...