Charlie Munger set the tone for the 2019 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. He said that people involved in creating cryptocurrencies, “honored the life and work of Judas Iscariot.” On many major subjects, questions were fired at Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger related to short comings which self-proclaimed expert observers see at Berkshire

The calendar is modest, with the big reports all hitting last week. Investors will never have more current information on the economy, the Fed, corporate earnings, and various risks than they do right now. It is difficult to guess what the punditry will do when given an open slate.

Demand stimulus has been in fashion in developed countries since the 2008/2009 financial crisis. Monetary policy in particular has been popular with zero interest rate policies and Quantitative Easing (QE) forming the backbone of macroeconomic policies in the UK, Japan, Europe and the United States. This may now be changing.

Since its inception in 2003, the Hennessy Japan Fund (HJPIX) has outperformed the TOPIX benchmark by 473 basis points. Masa Takeda, the fund’s manager, explains why valuations in Japan continue to be very attractive.

Global copper capacity could be short some 41,000 tons by as early as 2021, says one commodities research firm. Meaning: We could be looking at another commodities super-cycle, with the red metal leading the way.

Friends don’t let friends buy and hold. At a minimum, you need some type of hedging program on your equity portfolios. Using a simple 200-day moving average to signal the time for going to cash, while not the best, will help protect you from the worst of a massive bear market.

Once upon a time, bonds backed by a government’s full faith and credit pledge were generally considered less risky than corporate bonds. Times have changed. In today’s political climate, not all governments inspire us with the same confidence.

What is the value of a financial advisor in 2019? We break down the full value of an advisor’s services in this easy-to-follow equation.

All of the “signals” we’ve been focusing on in the past several months remain solidly “in the green”. So why are we apprehensive? Perhaps we shouldn’t be, and simply are falling prey to our inner “Chicken Little” who always thinks the sky is falling. We’ve been guilty of that before.

On the back of 1Q19 solid earnings results and healthy economic data releases, the S&P 500 continued its remarkable move higher this week and closed at a record high (2,933) for the first time since September 2018.

Sooner or later, some political shock will disrupt the current happy balance of robust global growth and low inflation, as US President Donald Trump’s trade wars and oil sanctions almost did last year. But until such a shock actually happens, investors can sit back and enjoy their porridge just the way they like it.

More than half of advisor websites are worthless. Read on to learn if yours is one and, if so, what a better option is for your marketing dollars.

In today’s episode of Market Week in Review, Head of AIS Business Solutions Sophie Antal Gilbert was joined by Chief Investment Strategist, Erik Ristuben. Together, they talked U.S. GDP, earnings seasons and Iranian oil waivers.

We discuss a very limited form of moat – one driven by a low-cost advantage that is not a result of scale of operations.

Renewable energy production in Latin America has grown dramatically over the last decade. The use of green technology like wind turbines and solar arrays continues to expand, as countries like Brazil seek to improve energy security and lower carbon emissions.

The Treasury Department will sell bonds and run up the debt. That’s a given. Then there will be a recession, as there always is, and then the Federal Reserve will take interest rates down to the zero boundary (otherwise known as financial repression and the devastation of savers), followed by unprecedented amounts of quantitative easing… just like Japan has done.

The big energy news this week is that President Donald Trump moved to end all sanction waivers for nations that import Iranian oil. In response, Brent crude oil hit $75 per barrel for the first time in six months this past week.

Is the stock market correct in its optimism that monetary normalization is over and equities have more runway in 2019?

Retail sales fell into contraction in December. Employment in February was the lowest since 2010. November new home sales growth dropped 14%. It was an ugly winter for macro data, but that weakness now looks anomalous: the data from the past month mostly point to positive growth. A recession starting in 2019 looks unlikely.

Last week we wrote how the US dollar could be in for a major move when it breaks up or down out of the major consolidation it has been in for the better part of six months.

One billion people lack access to safe drinking water, and this number is likely to grow to nearly 3 billion by 2050. To complicate this problem, 60 percent of the world’s population lives in crowded water basins shared by multiple states — many of whom are failing or are at war with one another. There is a lack of fresh water resources to meet water demand. It affects every continent and was listed in 2015 by the World Economic Forum as the largest global risk in terms of potential impact over the next decade. My guest today invests in solutions to this looming global water crisis.

It’s easy for investors to fall into what is known as “home country bias,” looking only within their own country’s borders for opportunities. Investors may be missing the boat if they don’t expand their opportunity set beyond their shores.

Our manager research showed growth outperforming value, though managers from both styles of investing bought the 2018 fourth quarter correction.

Bill Sharpe has focused the most recent phase of his career on retirement-income analysis. A big part of that work has been the creation of an online textbook covering the various subjects related to retirement planning.

NDX is now at a new all-time high (ATH). Leadership by NDX is a positive for SPX: historically, the risk/reward over the coming weeks and months for SPX has been excellent. Volatility has been unusually low so far this year. That's unlikely to last.

After suffering a tumultuous fourth quarter last year, the stock market rebounded nicely in the first quarter of 2019. Fears of an economic slowdown, escalating trade wars and monetary tightening gave way to optimism over continued economic expansion, low unemployment, a trade deal with China...

Lucas White and Jeremy Grantham examine the benefits of investing in a climate change strategy, including diversification, protection from climate risk, inflation protection and the ability to invest in growth-oriented companies at a discount.

Tax-free muni bonds saw $8.8 billion in inflows in the first quarter, beating U.S. equity funds and international equity funds. Investors were seeking stability as well as a strategy to counteract the changes to the tax code.

I think the next crisis will bring similarly radical, sudden changes. We will think the unthinkable because we will see no other choices. That means the range of possible scenarios may be wider than you think.

Inflation has remained muted through the first quarter of 2019. Could the pace pick up later in 2019?

It’s easy enough to throw a client a risk-tolerance questionnaire (RTQ) and call it a day. The RTQ is one thing; the client’s real emotions and behaviors are another.

Simply Google the phrase “what effect is Amazon having on retail” and you’ll discover a significant amount of information, articles and theories. Personally, I found the following article written by Susan Ward that articulated the sales of brick-and-mortar versus online to be quite illuminating.

I have created a series of articles, The Ultimate Financial Advisor’s Guide to Content Marketing, to serve as a one-stop guide to content marketing for financial advisors.

We recently heard a great adage about investing: “The stock market is the only market where people head for the exit when things go on sale.” And considering what followed 2018’s stock-market rout, heading for the exit certainly wasn’t a wise move.

Tax receipts were up 0.7% in the first six months of FY19. Individual tax receipts were down 1.7%. Corporate tax revenues fell 13.5%. Payrolls taxes rose 4.7%.

Rick Rieder and Russ Brownback argue that despite the market turbulence witnessed in the past several months, as well as a dramatic policy reversal, we find ourselves at a moment of remarkable economic stability. That fact, along with greater policy accommodation and capacity, argues for healthy and sensible risk taking.

Robert Kuharic, Investment Strategist, shares 3 key numbers tax-smart advisors should know that illustrate the tax pain reality of 2018.

The Dow Jones Industrials Average and S&P 500 are breathing down the neck of record highs set last Fall. Some take that as a sign to sell, time to shift out of equities and realize gains. We think that would be a mistake.

Press coverage around reverse mortgages has grown more positive as new research has explained how they can improve an overall retirement income plan. However, a lingering question remains about the costs of reverse mortgages.

Advisor Perspectives, a leading publisher serving financial advisors and the financial advisory community, has announced its Venerated Voices™ awards for commentaries published in Q1 2019.

The history of the stock market lays some reliable markers for long duration investors when it comes to these morals. First, in the long run, a basket of the cheapest of the stocks in the S&P 500 Index has outperformed the expensive ones by 3.6% per year...

Clearly I have been “sitting here in limbo” for the last few weeks relaxing in Key West, which is a profoundly different planet. I love it! We stayed at Casa Marina, a resort I would highly recommend to anyone. So while I was limbo, it would seem as though the stock market was in limbo, as well.

For the 20-year period, gold as an asset class had the second best annualized returns at 7.7 percent, according to JPMorgan. The S&P 500, by comparison, returned only 5.6 percent on an annualized basis, with bonds coming in at 4.5 percent.

I think the rest of the world will enter a period something like Japan endured following 1990, and is still grappling with today. It won’t be the end of the world; Japan is still there, but the little growth it’s had was due mainly to exports. That won’t work when every major economy is in the same position.

Members of the $20 billion club continue to look for ways to reduce the cost and risk of their jumbo-sized DB plans. Read about these latest trends.

Oil has been on the move. Oil equities, however, not so much. Naturally, the performance of stocks and commodities can deviate at times as they are generally influenced by various idiosyncratic and sector-specific factors.

Today, we examine another type of behavioral bias: the agency problem, which looks specifically at the issues that arise when one party is expected to act on behalf of another.

Markets are caught between incoming data that point to slower global growth and forward-looking factors that suggest improvement later in the year. With the pause in U.S. Federal Reserve rate hikes, we expect modest recovery in global cycle conditions.

n today’s low-growth, low interest-rate environment, investors should be patient, and look for opportunities to use volatility to get into desirable investments at the price you’re willing to pay.

Probably the most useful exercise we can do at present is to examine where the markets and the U.S. economy are in their respective cycles - with 19 charts and detailed analysis. There’s little question that the market is long into what Rhea described as the final phase of a bull market; “the period when speculation is rampant – a period when stocks are advanced on hopes and expectations.”