| Last year was a profitable but volatile one for investors. If you made good money and your portfolio is at an all-time high - as many readers told me lately - give yourself a well-deserved pat on the back. However, many investors floundered in 2023 - and it isn't hard to see why. 2022 was a disaster. The S&P 500 dropped 20%. (And most stocks fell substantially more.) Investors nationwide got a serious haircut. Bonds didn't provide much consolation. They had their worst year in history. But today - with bonds having rebounded and the stock market near all-time highs - the haircut is just a memory. Our portfolios look like the Fab Four in their prime again. That's because we've been on the right side of the market... My first column in Liberty Through Wealth last year was "Why I'm Bullish on 2023." But I couldn't fit in all my arguments. So, my second column was titled "Other Reasons I'm Bullish on 2023." Most readers were having none of it - and let me know about it. Market pundits everywhere were predicting that inflation would stay elevated, the Federal Reserve would push interest rates too high, and - as a result - the U.S. economy would fall into a recession. Wrong. Wrong. And dead wrong. While prices are certainly not down, inflation is moderating. The Federal Reserve has paused its rate hikes. And the economy grew at a better than 5% rate in the third quarter. Of course, if you ran your portfolio based on someone's scary forecasts, you haven't even been in the game. You've been on the sidelines. Yes, there are decent yields on money markets and certificates of deposit now. And gold has moved higher. But these pale in comparison to the returns we earned in stocks and bonds last year. All year long, I encouraged readers to step up to the plate. In February, I was interviewed by longtime subscriber and bestselling author Bill O'Reilly. Bill is a no-nonsense guy who rarely misses an opportunity to get right to the point. He didn't ask me about the near-term outlook for the economy, interest rates, inflation or the market. (Perhaps he already knows that I'm not Miss Cleo at the Psychic Network.) Instead, he got very direct: "Alex, what are you doing with your own money?" And so I told him, as I recounted in my column "Why Bear Markets Are an Investor's Best Friend": I'm buying high-quality stocks, just like I have in every market downturn over the last 40 years, including the crash of '87, the Gulf War bear market in 1990, the dot-com bust, the post-9/11 meltdown, the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, and the COVID collapse in 2020. I continued to touch on this theme throughout the year as the market gyrated. | 
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