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The Year That Diversification Missed The chart above captures much of why investors felt they had nowhere to hide in 2018; because they didn't. For the first time in decades, no major asset class beat inflation. Meaning, if we could travel back in time a year, the absolute best investment for most investors would have...
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Ze Pain of Market Corrections – Q3 2018 Market Commentary
(Updated: In an earlier version of this post, I couldn’t recall the name of the children’s book I reference throughout. I offered a $25 reward, payable to the sleuth’s charity of choice, for anyone who could help me. In less than a day, one of our readers emailed me the title “The Creature Department”. I happily…
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The Quarter In Charts – Q2 2018
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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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What Should I Do With My Next $_______?
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…
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Q2 2017 Market Commentary: It’s a Little Bit of Everything & If God Ran a Hedge Fund
All these psychics and these doctors They’re all right and they’re all wrong It’s like trying to make out every word When they should simply hum along It’s not some message written in the dark Or some truth that no one’s seen It’s a little bit of everything – Dawes “A Little Bit of…
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Why Bookies Don’t Work Local Swim Meets
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….