The costliest mistake: ignoring policy risk in your megacap-heavy portfolio Look, I still see the same blind spot pop up in way too many portfolios: 35-50% wrapped up in the Magnificent Seven and friends, with policy risk basically waved away as “noise.” It’s not noise. In 2025, EU cloud rules and tariff chatter are exactly the kind of things that move margins and, honestly, compress valuation multiples before earnings even blink. Quick reality check: the big names still dominate benchmarks. Last year, the Magnificent Seven hovered around ~30% of the S&P 500 by weight (S&P Dow Jones data, 2024). That…

When stocks and bonds fall together, options become your friend When stocks and bonds fall together, options become your friend. Look, the old rulebook said bonds cushion stocks. Then 2022 happened. The Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate Bond Index dropped about 13%, its worst year since inception in 1976, while stocks slid too. That single stat flips the usual diversification story on its head. The stock-bond correlation even turned positive for long stretches in 2022, so the classic 60/40 wasn’t a soft landing, it was a shared bruise. As I mentioned earlier, the cushion isn’t guaranteed when the Fed is moving the…

The costliest mistake: ignoring the currency, not the fees So, here’s the thing: for euro-based investors buying U.S. index funds, the real budget-buster isn’t the 0.05% vs. 0.10% expense ratio debate. It’s the euro-dollar moving 10-20% while you’re arguing over 5 basis points. That sounds dramatic, I know, but it’s not theory, it’s the historical tape. From January 2021 (around EUR/USD ~1.23) to late September 2022 (~0.95), the euro dropped roughly 22% against the dollar. Then it rebounded to ~1.12 by July 2023, about a 17% swing the other way. Even earlier, from March 2020 (~1.06) to January 2021 (~1.23),…