Robert Brokamp

choosing the right retirement account, and the long-term return of gold.

That and more on this Saturday Personal Finance edition of Motley Fool Money.

I'm Robert Brokamp, and this week I speak with financial planner and CPA Sean Mullaney about why some investors should favor pre-tax traditional retirement accounts despite all the benefits of Roth accounts.

But first, here are a few items from the news last week.

First up, we turn to the latest weekly asset allocation review from Urien Timmer, director of global macro at Fidelity Investments.

who writes that, quote, End of quote.

Indeed, since Halloween, the S&P 500 has returned 0.5% and the Nasdaq 100 has lost 2%.

Meanwhile, small caps, value stocks and international stocks are up 10%, 7% and 5% respectively.

As of this taping on the morning of January 22nd, Fidelity's Timber has labeled this, quote, a bullish broadening.

But those returns are nothing compared to what we've seen from gold, which brings us to our second news item of the week.

The Spider Gold Shares ETF, ticker GLD, was up 64% last year and is up 12% so far this year.

This past week was the anniversary of gold hitting a then record price of $850 in 1980, which was then followed by a slump that lasted more than two decades.

If you had bought at the 1980 peak and held to today's price of 4,800, your average annualized return would be less than 4%.

Meanwhile, if you invested $850 in the S&P 500 back in 1980 and held to today, you would have earned a total average annualized return of 12%, and your investment would have been worth more than $161,000, according to the S&P 500 calculator on the Of Dollars and Data blog.

And now the number of the week, which is 96%.

That's how much of the cost of tariffs that has been absorbed by consumers and importers, according to a recent study from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and highlighted in a Wall Street Journal article from this past week, foreign exporters absorbed only about 4% by lowering their prices.

That said, U.S.

inflation has remained moderate so far, with Harvard research indicating that only about 20% of the tariffs have fed into higher consumer prices within six months of implementation, as U.S.

importers and retailers have absorbed much of the costs.

We shall see if that continues in 2026.