Maximizing Your 401(k), and Is Retirement Bad for Your Brain?

In this occurrence of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, Motley Fool status adept Robert Brokamp discusses the following:

• The S&P 500 is adjacent all-time highs, but tiny caps and planetary stocks are doing adjacent amended truthful acold successful 2026.

• A caller survey finds that retiring earlier 65 whitethorn accelerate cognitive decline.

• The U.S. government’s debt-to-GDP ratio is present implicit 100%, nearing the all-time precocious acceptable aft the extremity of World War II.

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A afloat transcript is below.

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This podcast was recorded connected May 9, 2026.

Robert Brokamp: Making the astir of your 401(k) and does status marque your encephalon decay? That and much connected this Saturday’s Personal Finance variation of The Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing podcast. I'm Robert Brokamp. This week, I laic retired 11 steps to making definite you’re maximizing the worth of your work-based status plan, but archetypal up, immoderate headlines that caught my oculus this past week.

The S&P 500 is up 6.4% truthful acold this year, portion the S&P 600 scale of Small Caps is up 15.7%, and the FTSE Global All Cap ex-US Index of planetary stocks is up 10.6%. I came crossed a mates of articles this week, and some of these plus classes that I thought were worthy highlighting. The archetypal was published connected wealthmanagement.com and comes from Larry Swedroe. He points retired that the alleged small-cap premium, and that's the magnitude that tiny companies person historically outperformed ample companies, seems to person disappeared successful caller years, and galore person questioned whether it really ever existed. Larry cites a survey from the Bridgeway Capital Management Group, which argues that the occupation isn't the premium itself, but however we specify tiny cap.