When should you retire? Do you still enjoy your work?
Charles Passy interviews Gary Brownstein, who worked for 47 years at Acme Smoked Fish in Brooklyn in a variety of roles and shares the lessons he learned about work, career management, retirement and life.
How to plan for and enjoy life after your career
Illustration by Mark Long
The daily grind of work can take its toll, especially after decades. What if you had more flexibility and could work part time from home, while still using your expertise to help people? Georgia McManus is doing exactly that.
Read on: Visit the new Best New Ideas in Retirement 2022 page.
And why not start early? Want your kid to retire rich? Have the ‘money talk’ with them now.
After retirement — unretirement
Retiring is one thing, but what about going back to work? What if you are trying to do this when “on the wrong side of 50”? That age can seem rather young to many people, but it may also keep you from being considered for many jobs, even if no employer or hiring decision-maker would ever admit it.
This week in his “The View from Unretirement” column, Richard Eisenberg interviews Deborah Gale, who has built her own new career doing research about retirement and people’s attitudes about age and work, and providing related services to answer this question: “How are you going to disentangle yourself from the linear life course?“
Inflation gets even uglier
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The annual increase for the U.S. Consumer Price Index hit a new 40-year high of 8.6% in May, with a 1% increase for the month. Gasoline prices have now hit a record average price of $5 per gallon, and the Internal Revenue Services is giving taxpayers a break in response.
Rex Nutting digs deeply to list the largest contributors to the shocking increase in prices during May.
Related inflation coverage:
Housing inflation and the housing slowdown
Housing prices aren’t falling — yet. But the chief economist at Freddie Mac says this giant sector of the U.S. economy has begun its biggest slowdown in over a decade. Various studies support the notion of a housing slowdown, as Aarthi Swaminathan reports.
Related housing coverage:
Where will oil — and oil stocks — go from here?
West Texas crude oil is up about 62% for 2022.
FactSet
A combination of increasing demand, supply disruption, and low production and investment has led to a remarkable increase in the price of oil this year. And energy stocks may have more room to run, as they are cheaply priced compared to expected profits. Jeremy Weir of Trafigura expects a “parabolic” move upward for oil prices, even after this year’s increase. Then again, Matthew Tuttle expects a pullback and buying opportunity for investors.
Hulbert: Energy stocks are this year’s best performers — but they’re not on the list of top investment newsletters
The meaning of Target’s latest warning
Getty Images
Less than three weeks after Target’s warning about rising expenses pushed its stock down 25% in one day, the retailer described its plan to reduce bulging inventories, which would lower its profit margin. One analyst described the timing of the announcement as “somewhat careless,” while other analysts said Target’s problems reflected changes across the retail landscape, as Tonya Garcia reports.
Plan early to protect assets from nursing-home expenses
MarketWatch illustration
Quentin Fottrell — The Moneyist — shares planning strategies that can help shield family assets that might otherwise need to be depleted before Medicaid coverage of nursing-home expenses kicks in.
Partisanship and the Federal Reserve
Here’s an opinion piece from Robert Brusca about how partisan political concerns can affect Federal Reserve policy decisions.
More central-bank coverage: Fed will only need to get rates up to 3% to cool inflation, large-bank economists say
Good news for troublesome EV charging
Getty Images
Range anxiety is the big problem with electric cars. If you go on a long trip, “getting there” may revolve around keeping your vehicle charged. Two problems described in this Wall Street Journal horror story are “fast chargers” that are agonizingly slow, and chargers that don’t work at all.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has announced a plan (which is already funded) to standardize all U.S. EV charging stations, as Rachel Koning Beals reports.
More coverage of electric vehicles and Tesla:
Why the popular ARKK ETF really fell
FactSet
The chart above shows the price trajectory of the Ark Innovation ETF since the end of 2019. For that period, the ETF is down 9%. But during 2020, it soared 153%, before sliding 23% in 2021 and dropping another 53% so far this year. Mark Hulbert explains the fund’s wild performance swing — and it is not so simple as Cathie Wood making the wrong stock picks.
More from Mark Hulbert:
- Russell 2000 Index looks undervalued — if these companies are left out of the P/E calculation
- Cheer up, stock investors: U.S. consumers are feeling down about their money and inflation
How to play defense with ETFs
In this week’s ETF Wrap, Christine Idzelis interviews Gargi Chaudhuri, the head of BlackRock’s iShares investment strategy for the Americas, who shares a “defensive twist” strategy for investors worried about the economy.
MarketWatch illustration/iStockphoto
Hedge funds diversify their ranks
Steve Gelsi shows how top leadership in the hedge-fund industry has become more diversified.
Why has bitcoin held up better than ether?
FactSet
The new environment of central-bank tightening to fight inflation has helped push cryptocurrencies down this year, but bitcoin has outperformed ether by a wide margin. In this week’s Distributed Ledger column, Frances Yue asks industry insiders to explain why investors favor bitcoin while previewing a big change for Etherium.
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