Below are some pictures that help illustrate the current investment landscape. All of these charts show us where we’ve been, but none guarantees to show us what will happen in the future. Even though valuations tend to “revert to the mean” and certain data points can be leading indicators, nothing is guaranteed. In fact, that’s
Author: Justin Smith
Knowing full well that financial planning is about far more than numbers, Justin loves to help clients walk through both the routine and the significant decisions in life. While he could have been perfectly happy with a career as a mathematician or counselor; he is delighted to get to be both...often within the same meeting or even sentence. Justin thrives on being able to transform complex financial and relational issues into practical plans and clear action steps.
Winning the Retirement Game: A Look at Risk and Return
Playing a 3,000 Year-Old Board Game in Front of 200 Million People I’m a sucker for board games and Netflix documentaries, so when I stumbled on AlphaGo, I was sucked in. It chronicles the story of how a research group, DeepMind, developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based computer program (AlphaGo) so advanced it took on
A Step by Step Guide to Having a Family Money Talk
If you’re not already there, it’ll happen to you soon. You’ll need to have a Family Money Talk. Maybe you’re in your 20s asking your parents how much they could pay for a wedding. Or you could be in your 40s talking to your kids about their college choices. Our most frequent case, the one
Q1 2018 Market Commentary
The Return of Investor Pain and Volatility Every few weeks, Jonathan slides a chair up to my desk and pulls out an updated version of a chart, the Investor Pain Index. If you search for it online, you won’t find it. To call it “proprietary” would be accurate but (says Jonathan) far too complementary. The
Explaining Market Losses to a 10 Year-Old
Today the Dow Jones experienced a 4% drop, closing below 24,000 for the first time since November 28th (just 72 days ago). Furthermore, in the last 9 trading days, the Dow has dropped 10.3% from it’s all-time high (thus officially earning the name “a correction”). While it’s unsettling to see a pullback in the market,
2017 Market Recap & 3 Can’t Miss “Investments”
Without fail, the financial markets teach us lessons every year, but it is up to investors to learn. In 2017, the overwhelming lesson was a rerun: short term predictions are worthless (at best) and dangerous (at worst). We ran across a great example of predictions in Bob Seawright’s 2018 Investment Outlook. Seawright is Chief Investment
Tax Bill Update and Resources
For better or worse, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) has been signed into law. While it would be fun (is that the right word?) to explore the estimated impacts on our country and economy here, it would be more helpful to take some of our own advice and focus on the more certain
Q3 2017 Market Commentary
“All analogies break down if taken too far, just like a car. Only there’s no gas station & maybe the mechanic is an editor or logician & also…” – Ken Jennings, Jeopardy Champion Against the advice of Ken Jennings, and in order to better understand the stock market, we often talk about a different asset
Proposed Plan to “Fix Our Broken Tax Code”
For much of the year, we’ve told clients “let’s wait and see” when considering certain tax saving strategies like Roth conversions or a Qualified Charitable Distribution because we wanted to see what tax policies might come from Washington. On September 27th, the White House released the “Unified Framework for Fixing Our Broken Tax Code” to
We Answer the WSJ’s “19 Questions to Ask Your Financial Adviser”
As we have previously written, it is difficult for investors to know what to look for in their search for a financial adviser (or advisor). In his most recent Intelligent Investor column for the Wall Street Journal, Jason Zweig updates the timeline of the fiduciary rule and points out that since its delay, “the burden