Mind Over Market

CNBC's Squawk Box, Tuesday, May 14, 2013 Hedge fund titan David Tepper, founder and president of Appaloosa Management, told CNBC on Tuesday he's still bullish on stocks and investors shouldn't worry about the Federal Reserve tapering its massive bond-buying program. "There better be a true [Fed] taper or else you might be back into the last half of 1999," Tepper said in a "Squawk Box" interview. "So like guys that are short, they better have a shovel to get themselves out of the grave." Read more here .

A study by the Urban Institute has found that the big stock market crash of 2008 may not seriously impair retirement incomes if equity values recover halfway by 2017. In a computer simulation of a partial recovery in equity values, the overwhelming majority of people age 43 and older will have retirement incomes no less than they would have earned if there had been no crash at all in 2008. This surprising outcome is based on the assumption that workers did not sell their equity holdings during or after the crash, continue to make the same level of contributions to retirement plans, and continue to invest in equities at a level appropriate for their age. By Robert Stowe England mindovermarket.blogspot.com June 29, 2009 In spite of the losses from the stock market crash of 2008, the overwhelming majority of people age 43 and older are unlikely to see see lower retirement income than they would have received if there had been no stock market crash at all, according to a study by the Urban...

The Department of Labor and the Securities and Exchange Commission will hold a joint one-day hearing June 18 to explore issues that have been raised about target-date funds or life-cycle funds. These are funds that allocate assets into a mix of stocks and bonds based on the age of the investor, with higher equity allocations for younger investors. The poor performance of these funds in the market crash has raised issues about their appropriateness in employer-sponsored retirement saving plans. By Robert Stowe England June 8, 2009 The Department of Labor gave its regulatory blessing to target-date or life-cycle funds in the fall of 2007 at the peak of the market, giving employers the green light to offer these funds to employees who had not made a choice among the investment options in an employer's 401(k) plan. DoL then identified target-date funds as one allowable choice for so-called qualified default investment options (or QDIA's in the lingo of the bureaucrats). For more in...