The 3-2-1 crack blends gasoline and distillate into a single number, and that convenience hides something the market cares about a great deal: the two fuels do not always earn the same margin. Most of the time they move together,…
A refinery is, in the crudest terms, a spread trade: it buys crude oil, transforms it, and sells refined products. The gap between what it pays for the barrel and what it collects for the fuels is its gross margin.…
The Federal Reserve’s accounts show American households holding more than 14 trillion dollars in bank deposits and roughly 7 trillion in money market funds. Behind a reassuring average, though, lies a sharply divided reality the mean conceals. This page fixes…
A high-yield savings account and a money market fund cannot be compared on their headline yield alone. The comparison holds only after tax and after the teaser expires, and the two differ on a point the yield hides: one is…
US savings bonds lock a rate formula at the moment you buy them, for the life of the bond. Like a fixed-rate savings contract, they come in generations, each frozen at the terms of the day it was purchased, whatever…
A target-date fund is sold as a simple, set-and-forget win. It is first something narrower: a delegated glide path with a fee. The manager decides the allocation, the fund selection, the rebalancing and the de-risking, and charges for it, whatever…
US guaranteed savings products credit a rate that trails the bond market rather than tracking it. Through the recent rate cycle, multi-year guaranteed annuities and stable value funds moved from lean crediting rates to near fifteen-year highs, with a lag…
At death, most US financial accounts pass outside the will, straight to a named beneficiary, under tax rules that depend on the account, not the estate plan. The tax fate of an inherited account turns less on the will than…
A variable annuity does not carry one fee, but a stack of them. Mortality and expense charges, subaccount expense ratios, optional rider fees, administrative charges and surrender penalties each sit on top of the others, and most are deducted every…
The question of what order to fund accounts in usually draws a fixed list, presented as a rule to follow. The order documented in US financial literature is something else: a ranking of mechanics, with a rationale, not a personal…
