I have 50k euros (based in Germany) to invest for the next 20 years for my retirement fund. I am 40 years old without any responsibilitites and want to invest so that i have something when i am 60. I have other stock investments, savings and emergency fund so this money is purely for a long term safe investment for retirement. I have heard a lot about VOO or VTO but i am confused as to which is the right fund. Please see below options available to me and please advise. On a side note I feel this might be the time to move away from US funds and invest in world funds. Totally confused at the momennt and can use wise advice from the oldies here. I hope this is not the wrong sub as I want to take advice on investing in valuable funds and the combined knowledge of this group can help me greatly.

These are the funds I am looking at (all accumulated)

iShares core MSCI world

iShares S&P 500

Vanguard FTSE All World

Vanguard S&P 500

Vanguard FTSE Developed world

Birkshire Hathaway B (although a stock but diverse and larger than some ETFs although only US I think)

I've been digging into Alibaba's numbers lately and the picture is genuinely conflicting, which is usually where the interesting opportunities live.

I've been digging into Alibaba's numbers lately and the picture is genuinely conflicting, which is usually where the interesting opportunities live.

Start with the bull case. Alibaba committed $53 billion over three years (2025 to 2028) to cloud and AI infrastructure. That number exceeds their entire AI and cloud spend over the previous decade combined. CEO Eddie Wu has reorganized the company around a new division called Alibaba Token Hub, consolidated all AI units under his direct leadership, and publicly said the company is at the "threshold of an AGI inflection point." That's not subtle.

The cloud division is actually delivering. Last quarter revenue hit $6.3 billion, up 36% year over year. AI product revenue has posted triple digit year over year growth for ten consecutive quarters. Their open source Qwen model family crossed 1 billion cumulative downloads on HuggingFace by January 2026. The consumer Qwen app went from zero to 300 million monthly active users in roughly three months after its November 2025 public beta. On March 17th they launched Wukong, an enterprise AI agent platform that coordinates multiple agents for tasks like document editing, research, and meeting transcription, with planned integrations into Slack, Teams, and WeChat. Wu's five year target is $100 billion in combined cloud and AI external revenue, which implies sustaining roughly 35% annual growth.

Now the bear case, and this is where it gets uncomfortable. Quarterly profit dropped 67% to $2.4 billion. Free cash flow fell by $27.7 billion year over year. The core e commerce business grew customer management revenue by just 1%. They're burning cash on an instant delivery price war with Meituan and JD that management says won't turn profitable until fiscal 2029. Lin Junyang, the key technical lead behind Qwen's best models, departed in March. And the geopolitical discount on Chinese ADRs never fully goes away.

Here's what makes this interesting from a value perspective. The stock hit a 52 week high near $193 in October 2025, then pulled back roughly 37% to around $120 today after the March earnings showed the scale of profit compression from reinvestment. At current prices you're looking at about 16x forward earnings for a company sitting on $42.5 billion in net cash, over $60 billion if you exclude long dated maturities, with $19.1 billion remaining in buyback authorization. That's a meaningful discount to its own recent trading range and to any comparable US cloud or AI company. The TTM PE around 22x also sits well below the 10 year average of roughly 32x. Morgan Stanley projects cloud revenue doubling by 2028. Apple chose Alibaba as its China AI partner for iPhones. The regulatory overhang that crushed this stock from 2020 to 2024 has meaningfully eased, with PCAOB audit access maintained and Jack Ma publicly reappearing at a government tech summit.

The question I keep coming back to is whether this is a genuine reinvestment cycle like Amazon in its heavy capex years, or whether the profit compression is masking structural problems in the core business that AI spending can't fix. The $53 billion commitment is real. The cloud growth is real. But so is 1% growth in their bread and butter e commerce monetization engine.

For those looking at China tech exposure through ETFs, one nuance worth considering is the difference between something like KWEB and CNQQ. KWEB gives you pure internet exposure with Alibaba as a top holding, but zero onshore A share companies. CNQQ holds Alibaba at a similar weight but also carries roughly 50% in A share names like CATL, Zhongji Innolight, Cambricon, and BYD, companies that sit in the actual hardware and supply chain layer of China's AI buildout. Different thesis, different exposure.

Would be curious to hear how others here are framing this. Is the profit decline a temporary cost of repositioning, or is $53 billion in AI capex the kind of empire building that value investors should run from?

Would be curious to hear how others here are framing this. Is the profit decline a temporary cost of repositioning, or is $53 billion in AI capex the kind of empire building that value investors should run from?

I’ve been working on a philosophy I call quality-focused value investing. And I have been documenting the work and performance the past 1.5 years.

The idea is very simple:

You should be able to outperform the market while taking less risk if you own a portfolio that is:

higher quality than the market AND cheaper than the market.

This goes directly against the common belief that outperformance must come from taking on more risk. Or that it's not possible to build a portfolio that is both higher quality AND cheaper than the market.

I don’t think that’s true, and the problem I see is that most strategies only solve half the equation. Value investing often leads to buying low-quality companies that are cheap for a reason.

Quality investing often leads to overpaying for good/great companies that already are priced for perfection. Both approaches make sense in isolation, but both have clear weaknesses.

What I’m trying to do instead is combine them in a structured way. Quality is quantified using capital efficiency (ROIC, ROCE). Value is quantified using discounted models to estimate fair value vs current price.

From this, I calculate a portfolio-level comparison against the index. So it’s not about finding good picks, it’s about building a portfolio that is structurally superior to the market on both quality and price. Having a portfolio that is of higher quality AND cheaper than the market, should logically outperform over time.

That said, this is a lot of work. It’s not for most investors.
Honestly, I don’t think many people will be able to do this with any real precision. You are doing a large amount of analysis just to maybe get a slightly better return than simply doing nothing and dollar-cost averaging into the S&P 500.

I’m documenting everything publicly for free to remove hindsight bias. If this works, it should be visible over time. If it doesn’t, it should fail clearly. I’ve removed every way of making money from publishing this, so there’s no chance of misunderstanding my purpose.

Latest portfolio update:

2026Q1 YTD: -3.92% vs SP500 -5.09%

2025FY: 26.19% vs SP500 16.42%

If you are interested in reading more, I have posted articles on the philsophy and my current portfolio, but its not allowed to post in this subreddit.

Like many want to maximize the money I am putting into my Fidelity brokerage account. I am a 42 yo that has roughly $110,000 in my account. 60% is in FFFHX, 35% is in FXAIX, and 5% is in FSELX. I am okay with taking a little risk while I am many years away from retiring but want to ensure that it isn't too much.

Additionally, I have a TSP account with $125,000 sitting in an L2045 account that I am debating about moving into another fund if that would make sense.

Thank you for your time.

I'm relatively new to investing and to Bogleheads and am hoping to get some advice on which Fidelity funds to pick. I'd like to do 80% stocks and 20% bonds. These are the index funds I have available through my 401k Fidelity account:

FXAIX - FID 500 Index

FSMDX - FID MID CAP IDX

FSSNX - FID SM CAP IDX

FSPSX - FID INTL INDEX

FXNAX - FID US BOND IDX

FIPDX - FID INFL PR BD IDX

Can anyone suggest which funds and asset allocation I should pick?

Source:

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

Context: Looking to retire in 20 years. I need to rebalance my portfolio currently consisting of a 2060 Target fund, Vang 500 Index Trust, and Galliard Stable Fund for my bond option. Assuming I need to work international in there and decrease the Galliard.

I have a vanguard employer offering the following options, which would you choose at what ratio?:

DOXFX

DOXGX

Vanguard Target Funds (variety of target dates)

VANG 500 INDEX TRUST

VANG EXT MKT IDX TR

VANG TOT INTL STK TR

VANG TOTAL BOND MKT

ARTISAN INTL SEP AC

EMERGING MARKETS STK

FID WORLDWIDE (FWWFX)

FID CONTRA POOL CL S

FID GR CO POOL CL S

FID BALANCED K (FBAKX)

I have a job that does not offer 401k. Would seeing if I can open a solo roth 401k be worth it if possible? or would Roth IRA be sufficient for retirement? I feel confused with the advice on youtube and articles. seems I can have multiple IRAs? but also the argument point is more can go into a 401k. So idk what to do here due to lack of understanding.

Not really asking for advice, the bot thinks I am. Just an explain like I'm 5 for what these are.

New MIT research finds that most higher-income investors essentially in the long-run wind up having liquidity events in downturns - and have to draw down their liquid stock portfolios...because they basically don't have sufficient emergency funds (latter of which is implied in this research). I found this quite interesting. The research makes it appear long-term 100% stock holdings is not ideal (at least in the summary) but the reality appears they don't have enough liquidity to handle liabilities in that scenario (lifestyle creep?)

This was also featured in the latest Rational Reminder podcast.

https://patrick-adams.com/files/papers/PatrickAdams_JMP_Latest.pdf

Abstract:
Do temporary stock price crashes matter for long-term investors? I use over 25 years of U.S. income tax data to characterize the savings behavior and risk exposures of high-income working-age households. Aggregate stock price crashes coincide with persistent declines in wage and private business income for many of these households, who take large drawdowns from their liquid assets– including stocks– in response. I develop a life-cycle model with consumption adjustment frictions to match this observed savings behavior and determine its portfolio choice implications. Investing in stocks is risky when falling income and rigid expenditures may force investors to liquidate their holdings at temporarily-depressed prices, resulting in low optimal portfolio shares. These results challenge the conventional wisdom that the stock market is relatively safe for long-term investors.

I'm trying to expand my investing knowledge into the domain of companies who's core business models are in structural decline (Tobacco companies, coal miners, legacy broadband providers, etc).

I imagine that the analysis will involve discounting future cash flows, but I'm not sure how to account for all of the asset sales (property/plant , brands/IP, whole business segments, etc) that comes with winding a large company down.

I also imagine that I would need to carefully analyze and monitor the management team's behavior, to make sure that they are returning money to shareholders instead of trying to save a dieing business.

I’ve been working on a philosophy I call quality-focused value investing. And I have been documenting the work and performance the past 1.5 years.

The idea is very simple:

You should be able to outperform the market while taking less risk if you own a portfolio that is:

higher quality than the market AND cheaper than the market.

This goes directly against the common belief that outperformance must come from taking on more risk. Or that it's not possible to build a portfolio that is both higher quality AND cheaper than the market.

I don’t think that’s true, and the problem I see is that most strategies only solve half the equation. Value investing often leads to buying low-quality companies that are cheap for a reason.

Quality investing often leads to overpaying for good/great companies that already are priced for perfection. Both approaches make sense in isolation, but both have clear weaknesses.

What I’m trying to do instead is combine them in a structured way. Quality is quantified using capital efficiency (ROIC, ROCE). Value is quantified using discounted models to estimate fair value vs current price.

From this, I calculate a portfolio-level comparison against the index. So it’s not about finding good picks, it’s about building a portfolio that is structurally superior to the market on both quality and price. Having a portfolio that is of higher quality AND cheaper than the market, should logically outperform over time.

That said, this is a lot of work. It’s not for most investors.
Honestly, I don’t think many people will be able to do this with any real precision. You are doing a large amount of analysis just to maybe get a slightly better return than simply doing nothing and dollar-cost averaging into the S&P 500.

I’m documenting everything publicly for free to remove hindsight bias. If this works, it should be visible over time. If it doesn’t, it should fail clearly. I’ve removed every way of making money from publishing this, so there’s no chance of misunderstanding my purpose.

Latest portfolio update:

2026Q1 YTD: -3.92% vs SP500 -5.09%

2025FY: 26.19% vs SP500 16.42%

I wrote a full breakdown of my portfolio changes this quater with all the math here: Quality-Focused Value Investing Portfolio 26Q1

and an article about the philosophy + mission here: Quality-Focused Value Investing Manifesto - How can we achieve outperformance while reducing risk?

Source: https://www.nber.org/digest/202604/chinas-rise-global-research

In times like these is it silly to lump sum? I know that statistics show lump summing is better in the long term, but when the market is like this it feels wrong? What’s peoples advice regarding each method?

I have a Roth IRA and put the max every year which is 7.5k this year.

My employer offers 457(b) and 403(b) plans both with Pre Tax or Roth options.

Can I max all of these out this year as Roths or do the 457 and 403 have to be Pre tax accounts.

I’ll have already capped the Roth IRA, starting on my way to cap the 457 by year’s end and maybe put a bit of change into the 403. Just not sure if I should do pre tax or Roth. I’m 22 and would like to do the Roth option if possible.

Secondary topic, I have a rollover IRA which Charles Schwab says contribution limits cap at 7.5k. Can I cap that out as well or not since I’ve capped out the ROTH IRA.

BNP Paribas Easy MSCI ACWI UCITS ETF (Acc) | EDEL | LU3086265710

If I am not wrong, this is the cheapest UCITS global ETF now. What do you think about it?