Insights from the field

Investment design, tax strategy, equity compensation, retirement planning, and separating hype from substance.

  • Investments|Research  September 18, 2026 ⋅ 6 min

    Backtested Investment Performance Results

    Backtested investment results can look highly persuasive while providing little evidence about future performance. A recent working paper by Alex Vidovich shows ways in which common backtesting practices can produce false-positive rates far above accepted research standards, especially when researchers repeatedly test variations against the same historical data.

    Steve McConnell, CFP®

  • Investments   Coming Soon

    Bond Funds are Not Bonds, and Why That Matters

    Investors building a retirement portfolio assume that bond funds behave like bonds, but most bond funds do not. They lose value when interest rates rise, they don't have maturity dates, and there's no time at which you can cash in the fund for its par value. Most bond funds perform more like low-volatility low-return stock funds than individual bonds. However, there's a relatively new type of bond fund that offers performance similar to actual bonds, and these fill a longstanding gap in retirement investment planning.

    Steve McConnell, CFP®

  • Retirement Planning  September 10, 2026 ⋅ 6 min

    Why we ignore the 4% rule

    The 4% rule is both one of the most cited numbers in retirement planning and one of the least useful. The rule makes questionable assumptions about investments, spending patterns, future income, future assets, and life expectancy. It turns out, when all factors are considered, the 4% rule isn't even a good first order approximation.

    Steve McConnell, CFP®

  • Investments|Retirement Planning  June 30, 2026 ⋅ 16 min

    Dedicated Spending Sleeves: An Institutional Strategy for Households

    Sequence of returns refers to the risk that an extended down cycle begins at the onset of retirement. The risk that a down cycle will permanently impair your retirement portfolio is real. Conventional wisdom treats this as an asset allocation problem, but the typical response of moving heavily into bonds (or bond funds) as you approach retirement can make the problem worse. A better solution makes targeted use of a specific type of bond fund.

    Steve McConnell, CFP®

  • Equity Compensation  June 1, 2026 ⋅ 6 min

    ISO Options, AMT, and the Multi-Year Strategy

    How many ISOs can you exercise without triggering AMT? That's a good question for one year, but it potentially misses a more important strategy question. Here's how that issue unfolds across a multi-year horizon.

    Steve McConnell, CFP®

  • Investments  September 8, 2026 ⋅ 12 min

    Can Investors Benefit from the Active Management of Value Line Funds?

    Most active managers underperform their benchmarks, but Value Line has a long enough record of exceptions that the Value Line Effect is cited as an anomaly for the Efficient Market Hypothesis. This analysis compares seven Value Line funds to factor-matched index fund clones over 2015–2024, built with the Fama-French five-factor model. Index clones won in five of seven cases. Value Line's mid cap growth and small cap growth funds outperformed, which is a rare result.

    Steve McConnell, CFP®

  • Investments  September 7, 2026 ⋅ 10 min

    The Case Against Direct Index Investing

    Direct indexing promises lower costs, personalization, and better tax-loss harvesting. This Field Note finds it delivers none of these reliably. Model fees and small-lot trading friction exceed index fund expense ratios; the alternative to that is to hold only a subset of the index's stocks and introduce tracking error, which can be significant. Customization and tax-driven trades introduce tracking error and drift toward active management. Traditional index funds and ETFs serve the same goals more effectively.

    Steve McConnell, CFP®