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How much are you going to spend in retirement? What once seemed like a simple question has become incredibly complicated in recent years.

The unusually strong performance of US stocks in 2013 was a welcome surprise for investors who are following a simple buy-and-hold strategy and a source of exasperation for many professionals caught flatfooted by the steady rise in share prices.

It was the best year for the S&P 500 Index since 1997, with a total return in excess of 32%. The size and value dimensions were even more rewarding: 2013 was the best calendar year since inception for the DFA U.S. Large Cap Value Portfolio, while the DFA U.S. Micro Cap Portfolio had its second-best performance in 32 years of operation.

It’s that time of the year when the talking heads of television and the prognosticators of print issue their sage outlooks for the coming 12 months. While this crystal ball gazing is always entertaining, it becomes even more so a year later.

You may have read that the last day of 2013 is scheduled to be the last day for an estimated 57 different tax deductions--unless the U.S. Congress turns its attention away from the next potential government shutdown and extends some or all of them. All of these deductions will be available to the 2013 tax return that you file by April 15.

Grunden Financial Advisory, Inc. is pleased to announce Eugene Fama has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. Professor Fama's groundbreaking work on asset pricing and markets provides the foundation for our investment philosophy and his work also inspired the founding of Dimensional Fund Advisors.

For some of us, it’s hard to give up on the idea that investing should be exciting. Picking stocks can be fun, after all, and there’s nothing like getting your timing right and bragging about it later with friends.

Markets recently have had a rocky time as investors in aggregate reassess prospects for monetary policy stimulus in the US. Is this something to worry about?

The world’s most closely watched central bank unsettled financial markets by flagging that it may start to scale back its bond purchases later this year.

Trying to correctly time your entry point to the market is never easy. Just ask the experts.

In early February, strategists at a global investment bank were becoming alarmed at political events in Europe, the sequestration “crisis” in the US Congress, and what they saw as an unseemly rush into equities.

The investment community lost one of its more colorful characters last week with the passing of Martin F. Zweig, a prominent market pundit, author, and chairman of Zweig-DiMenna Associates LLC, a New York investment firm. His death also marks the close of another chapter in the long-running debate on the virtues of market timing.

Throughout 2012, nervous investors did not have to look hard for reasons to avoid the financial markets. The daily headlines provided abundant gloom to feed their doubts, but investors who acted on impulse could have missed a potential opportunity to participate in strong returns across the global financial markets.