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…
Sylvia Bloom started in 1947 as a legal secretary and finished as a legal secretary, 67 years later Sylvia Bloom was born in Brooklyn in 1917, the daughter of Eastern European immigrants and a child of the 1929 Depression. She attended New York public schools and graduated from high school. She worked days to attend…
“Is a Roth IRA right for me?” is a simple question with a complex answer. Even worse, myths and misconceptions surrounding Roth IRAs make them seem more complicated than they are. We’ll address the four most common rules covering withdrawals, contribution limits, home purchases, and taxes. Even if these rules don’t apply to you, it’s…
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,…
In short, yes. But don’t take our word for it: as seen in their 2017 annual report, the Social Security and Medicare Board of Trustees “project that the combined trust funds will be depleted in 2034“. However, the Social Security Administration and Congress have a few “levers” they can pull to extend this 2034 date…
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…
In 1976 I went to work as a stockbroker. Five other brokers and I shared a bullpen, the perfect Petri dish for the Herd Mentality. Every two desks shared a stock quote machine. We were in constant earshot of each other and “dialed for dollars,” almost in unison. When one of us hit a dry…
We get this question often. A client will have just received an inheritance or sold a piece of property and has a lump sum of money. Or maybe they have just received a raise or paid off a debt and now have a higher monthly cash flow. “What do I do with this money?” can…
My wife and I have been in the thick of swim team at the neighborhood pool. With our 9 and 7 year-old girls on the team and their 4 year-old brother to cheer them on, Tuesday nights take on a whole new meaning. By far, the most entertaining events are the 6 and under heats….
Seven years after the Obama Administration proposed a fiduciary rule to protect investors’ retirement accounts from conflicted advice, the DoL Fiduciary Rule finally went into effect June 9, 2017. What does that mean for investors? Imagine a world where no school system owns their own buses. All busing has been privatized and the DoL Fiduciary…
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