Alexander Harmsen

Fund fees have fallen more than 60% since 2006, and that's actually bad news if you're the one still paying yesterday's average. New Morningstar data: the average US fund fee is now 0.32%, down from 0.80% two decades ago. Most people paying above average have no idea they are, because the number that matters isn't any single fund's fee. It's the blended fee across everything they hold. One old fund at 0.75% sitting next to five funds at 0.05% still drags the whole portfolio's average up more than people expect. Your personal blended number is one page away, not a spreadsheet away. Check yours: portfoliopilot.com Disclaimer: All facts and figures shared in this content, including the attached image, are for illustrative purposes only and don’t constitute financial advice in any way shape or form

Your coffee price is basically a bet on Brazilian weather, whether you meant to make one or not. Brazil grows 35% of the world's coffee, more than Vietnam, Colombia, and Indonesia combined, per USDA data. When that much of global supply sits in one country, a rough harvest there doesn't stay a Brazil problem. US coffee prices are up roughly 31% year over year, among the sharpest food-inflation moves in the country. Concentration risk shows up on a grocery receipt too, not just a portfolio statement.

Two thousand characters. That's the space PortfolioPilot leaves open for the part of your financial life a dropdown can't capture, in your own words: an account you'll never touch, a stock thesis you're not budging on, a parent you're quietly supporting. Type it into the “anything else PortfolioPilot should know” field and it factors into your recommendations. Small box. Enough to capture the 10,000+ other settings we didn't want to add explicit filters for. Disclaimer: All facts and figures shared in this content, including the attached image, are for illustrative purposes only and don’t constitute financial advice in any way shape or form

There's an index that scores every country on how free universities are from state and institutional interference: the Academic Freedom Index, updated for 2025 by V-Dem and Our World in Data. The headline number: academic freedom has declined in 50 countries since 2015. It improved in 9. No single country explains that. Fifty countries moved the same direction over the same decade.

For thirty years the instruction was simple: contribute, invest, hold, repeat. Then you retire, and the instruction reverses overnight. Now it's which of thirty different holdings to sell first, in what order, in which account, to raise cash without triggering a tax bill that undoes the whole point. Nobody trains for the second half. Disclaimer: All facts and figures shared in this content, including the attached image, are for illustrative purposes only and don’t constitute financial advice in any way shape or form

The trends that define an economic era always look permanent while they're happening. Global trade integration didn't just plateau. It's been unwinding for almost two decades, well before tariff headlines and pandemic-era supply-chain snarls put “reshoring” back in the vocabulary. The case for hyper-globalization was real: falling tariffs, containerization, and China's 2001 entry into the WTO pushed trade from 38% of world GDP in 1980 to a peak of 61% in 2008, per World Bank data. That era delivered cheaper goods and two decades of lower inflation. But 2008 was the high-water mark, not a new normal. Trade integration has fallen roughly 8 percentage points since, while more than 3,000 protectionist measures now get enacted globally every year as countries trade cost efficiency for resilience. This has nothing to do with predicting the next tariff headline. A lot of portfolios built over the last 20 years assumed global supply chains only get cheaper and more interconnected. That assumption described one 28-year window, not a permanent feature of the economy.

A friend once told me his net worth was “around 2 million, give or take a few hundred thousand.” The give-or-take turned out to be his entire outstanding mortgage balance. Most people can rattle off their salary to the exact dollar without thinking. Ask for net worth and the answer gets vague fast, not because the math is hard, but because salary is one number someone already handed them on a pay stub, and net worth means adding up everything yourself, including the parts that subtract, like that mortgage balance. Disclaimer: All facts and figures shared in this content, including the attached image, are for illustrative purposes only and don’t constitute financial advice in any way shape or form

Forty percent of self-made millionaires have paid off their mortgage entirely. Most don't drive a luxury car, live in an impressive house, or look wealthy at all. That's the finding from a twenty-year study of America's wealthy: the majority are business owners or professionals who spend well below their means and pay off their credit cards every month. Wealth, in this data, correlates far more with what you don't spend than with what you earn. The doctor with the newest car in the parking lot is frequently not the one with the biggest net worth. It's a less exciting story than the one usually told about getting rich. It also happens to be the one that's actually replicable.

If you had to pick just one: grow your money faster, or make sure a bad year can't wreck the plan? Most people answer growth until you ask them to put a real number on the bad year. You'd be surprised how often the answer flips. Disclaimer: All facts and figures shared in this content, including the attached image, are for illustrative purposes only and don’t constitute financial advice in any way shape or form

The country running the world economy always feels permanent. It never is. - 1820s: China leads the world in output. - 1800s: The British Empire climbs to nearly a quarter of global GDP at its peak. - 1947: The US peaks at 29.7% of world GDP, the highest share any single country holds in the dataset. - 2025: Adjusted for purchasing power, China holds the largest share again. Every economy in that chart assumed it was the exception. None of them were.

A portfolio can be improved in more ways than “buy more, sell less.” Here are five, all sitting on one dashboard, for anyone who assumes there's only one lever to pull: 1. The single highest-impact trade available right now, ranked by how much it moves your score. 2. Where you're overpaying in taxes, and the harvest that fixes it. 3. Which fund is quietly charging you more than it needs to. 4. A one-click reweight of what you already own. No new positions required. 5. Where the next $10,000 should actually go. Run all five at once as a single draft you can review before anything is real. Same dashboard, five different problems. Disclaimer: All facts and figures shared in this content, including the attached image, are for illustrative purposes only and don’t constitute financial advice in any way shape or form

Ukraine now spends 40% of its entire GDP on defense. Russia spends 7.5%. In dollar terms Russia's defense budget is bigger, $190 billion versus $84.1 billion, per SIPRI. But measured against the size of each economy, Ukraine is carrying a burden more than five times heavier. For scale, the global average is 2.5% of GDP.

A down day in your portfolio can be a receipt you haven't cashed yet, not only a loss on paper. Sell a position at a loss, buy something similar, and you lock in a tax deduction while keeping your market exposure intact. Most investors only think to do this in December. The opportunity shows up constantly and is oftentimes gone weeks later. Most of it goes unclaimed. Disclaimer: All facts and figures shared in this content, including the attached image, are for illustrative purposes only and don’t constitute financial advice in any way shape or form

Global coal use in 2025 was mostly flat or falling. Except in one country. US coal consumption rose 0.80 exajoules last year, more than any other nation, a 10% jump year over year. Indonesia was a distant second at +0.43. Per the Energy Institute, five countries accounted for 80% of the world's rising coal demand. One exajoule powers roughly 25 million American homes for a year. “Coal is dying” and “US coal demand just spiked” are both true stories about the same year.

Most people never plan a single trade against their whole portfolio. They remember three tickers a friend mentioned and call it research. If you are a PortfolioPilot user, here's a four-step way to make one trade on purpose instead of by memory. 1. Start from your whole portfolio, not a blank page. See what you're actually missing before you add anything new. 2. Filter in plain English instead of a dozen dropdowns. ‘Funds that don't overlap with what I already own’ is a real filter now, not a line no screener lets you type. 3. Read the reasoning before the ticker. Score impact first, security symbol second. 4. Send anything that survives to a draft, not straight to your brokerage. Test it before it's real money. Four steps, same idea underneath: research before conviction, conviction before money. Disclaimer: All facts and figures shared in this content, including the attached image, are for illustrative purposes only and don’t constitute financial advice in any way shape or form

Costa Rica has the highest child poverty rate in the OECD, 29.6%. Finland has the lowest, 4.6%. The US sits at 21.1%, well into the bottom third of the 38 OECD countries. But “poverty” here isn't a fixed income level. The OECD's definition is relative: half of each country's own median household income. Norway's poor and Mexico's poor are being measured against completely different bars. Same word, different yardstick in every country on the chart.

Every fund analysis shows you the last five years of returns. Some will tell you where they think it lands a year from now. But only the honest ones show a forecast band instead of a single guess. A forecast band is two things together: where the fund is expected to land, and how wide the realistic range around that actually is, updated as conditions change instead of frozen the day someone wrote the fact sheet. The number everyone quotes is a single point. The band around it is the more honest answer, because it tells you how much to trust the point in the first place. Disclaimer: All facts and figures shared in this content, including the attached image, are for illustrative purposes only and don’t constitute financial advice in any way shape or form

Labor just took home its smallest share of nonfarm business income in 79 years of data. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' nonfarm-business labor share, wages and benefits as a share of the value businesses produce, fell to 52.9% in Q2 2026, the lowest since the series began in 1947. Wages have grown in that time. They simply haven't grown as fast as the return on the capital that owns the businesses. Economists point to a few compounding drivers: - companies investing more in machines, software, and automation relative to headcount - more industries concentrated among a few dominant firms with less pressure to compete for workers - a growing share of corporate value sitting in intangible capital (software, patents, brand) that isn't owned by the workforce.

Every recommendation on PortfolioPilot comes with a reason attached, not just an instruction. Here's what one actually looks like once you open it up, in plain terms. The suggestion: buy $60,000 of a securitized-credit ETF. Not a hot pick: a category this portfolio didn't have at all, sitting next to a lot of large-cap stocks and crypto. The first reason given isn't “this will go up.” It's that the portfolio was running hotter than its target risk level, and this specific holding nudges that back down while adding diversification, instead of just trimming what's already there. It also fills a gap in interest-rate and credit exposure with a return driver that doesn't move in lockstep with the rest of the portfolio, which matters most exactly when stocks get more correlated with each other. Score moved from 765 to 785. Expected portfolio return ticked up too, and so did the dividend and fixed income the portfolio throws off each year, from about $56,600 to about $61,000. Not one number moving. Several, for different reasons. Disclaimer: All facts and figures shared in this content, including the attached image, are for illustrative purposes only and don’t constitute financial advice in any way shape or form

To be in the top 10% of net worth worldwide, you need about $306,000. To be in the top 10% within the US alone, you need roughly $1.9 million. Same percentile, six times the bar, entirely because of where the line is drawn. Perspective depends entirely on which line you're standing in, not just the number next to your name.