美国国家公共电台 NPR The Soaring Stock Market And Your Nest Egg

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ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

The stock market has been booming lately. After the Dow crossed 20,000 for the first time in January, it kept surging. It's been above 21,000 this week. NPR's Chris Arnold looks at what's going on and what it means for your retirement¹ account.

CHRIS ARNOLD, BYLINE²: Rasheed Irani works for a helicopter manufacturing company in Torrance, Calif. And like many Americans, he's been paying more attention to the stock market lately.

RASHEED IRANI: I was speaking with my wife. And we were both obviously happy that the market is going up. And she said, I'm so glad that our 401(k) is doing much better now that Trump³ is the president. She thought that it was because of Trump. But I think I was able to convince her that it is not (laughter).

ARNOLD: Actually, many investors⁴ do seem to be enthusiastic about Trump's pledges to cut taxes and regulations and build infrastructure⁵. But beyond the debate over why the market is up, other people are wondering, do they own enough stocks? Or maybe they own too many stocks. And what happens next? To get some answers, we called up Burt Malkiel. He's an economist⁶ and an author of a classic book on investing called "A Random⁷ Walk Down Wall Street." He's also the head of investments for the robo-adviser⁸ Wealthfront. Malkiel says he's getting...

BURT MALKIEL: A lot of questions about the market. And what I tell people is nobody - and I mean nobody - is able to tell you whether the market is too high or too low.

ARNOLD: Well, that doesn't sound very helpful. But Malkiel says you don't need to know where the market's headed next.

MALKIEL: Let me tell you the one thing that I am absolutely a hundred percent sure of, and that is the lower the fee I pay to the purveyor⁹ of an investment service, the more there is going to be for me.

ARNOLD: Pay the lowest fees possible. Malkiel says that's crucial. He says you also want to have the right mix of stocks and bonds and real-estate funds. Robo-advisers like his can set that up for you at a very low cost, but he says you do not want to play the game of paying brokers¹⁰ or mutual¹¹ fund managers a lot more than that to try to pick a bunch of stocks that'll be winners.

MALKIEL: This was something Warren Buffett stressed in his annual letter to shareholders¹².

ARNOLD: That came out just this past weekend. And Buffett wrote about a $1 million bet he made with a hedge fund manager nine years ago. Buffett bet that a simple, low-fee index fund that just blindly owned 500 major U.S. companies - that over a decade, that would beat any group of hedge funds that the person betting against him would choose. The hedge fund manager who took the bet is losing big time. Buffett's simple index fund has gained nearly four times as much value as the group of hedge funds.

That just seemed like a colossally¹³ huge difference.

MALKIEL: That's absolutely right, and the fees border on the obscene.

ARNOLD: So there are good ways to invest online at very low costs, but some people still want a human being to talk to about investing and financial planning. And that can get risky¹⁴.

KEVIN KELLER: Just because a person calls himself or herself a financial adviser, they may be nothing more than a sales person.

ARNOLD: That's Kevin Keller, the head of the CFP Board, which represents certified¹⁵ financial planners. He says many advisors¹⁶ get commissions to steer¹⁷ you into bad investments with big fees.

KELLER: That's why it's so important to select an adviser that's going to work in your best interest.

ARNOLD: The Obama administration had put a rule in place that would require just that. But the Trump administration has now moved to delay it and might kill it. So for now, Keller says what you should do is ask your adviser if he or she is acting¹⁸ in your best interest at all times and get it in writing. Chris Arnold, NPR News.

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