Portfolio Strategies

I hunt for gains, but I also focus on the messy, underappreciated side of investing: taxes. Over the years I’ve used tax-loss harvesting (TLH) as a pragmatic tool to reduce tax drag in taxable accounts. Doing it well across multiple taxable accounts — and when you’re rotating into similar ETFs rather than identical ones — requires clear rules, careful record-keeping, and a dose of common sense. Below I walk through how I harvest losses...

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Generating steady income from options is attractive: premium flows, time decay working in your favor, and a wide menu of strategies from covered calls to credit spreads. But the same leverage and asymmetric payoff that make options lucrative also create concentrated downside risk if you size positions poorly. I approach options income the same way I approach real estate or equities: start with clear allocation rules, measure potential loss, and...

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I often get questions from readers who are approaching retirement with a relatively small nest egg and a big fear of sequence-of-returns risk: “How can I avoid a large drawdown in the early years of retirement?” Volatility targeting is one practical technique I use and recommend to help smooth drawdowns while keeping a meaningful allocation to growth assets. In this article I’ll walk you through what volatility targeting is, why it matters...

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I run scenario analysis on my clients’ retirement plans like a pilot runs checklists before takeoff: it’s not glamorous, but it’s the thing that prevents disaster. When I talk about a portfolio’s “glidepath” toward retirement income, I mean the path your asset allocation, expected returns, volatility, and withdrawals together create as you transition from accumulation to distribution. Scenario analysis doesn’t predict the future....

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I’ve helped investors and real estate owners quantify risk and design practical hedges for years, and one of the most common problems I see is a concentrated stock position — often an employee with most of their net worth parked in one company. Options are a powerful, flexible tool to reduce that tail risk without necessarily selling shares and triggering a taxable event or giving up upside. Below I walk through the approaches I use and...

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I often get asked how to validate an investment idea without paying for fancy software or hiring a quant team. One of my favorite ways to do that is to backtest a straightforward momentum strategy in Excel using free data sources. It’s practical, transparent, and — crucially — reproducible. In this article I’ll walk you through the exact steps I use, including where to get data, how to structure your spreadsheet, the formulas to...

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I retired early with a significant portion of my net worth in property and a smaller — but still meaningful — allocation to equities. Over the years I’ve seen readers ask a recurring question: what does a 70/30 real estate-to-equity split actually look like in practice for an early retiree? In this piece I walk through the mechanics, the risks, and a few realistic examples of income and liquidity management so you can judge whether a heavy...

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When markets slow and headlines scream “recession,” my first instinct isn’t to panic — it's to revisit the portfolio’s structural defenses. Over the past decade of working with investors and writing about portfolio strategies at Wealthstatista, I’ve come back again and again to the same practical combination: dividend-focused ETFs paired with short-duration bonds. Together they can provide income, downside dampening, and the...

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