Like stuck card players trying to win it all back in one hand, equity bulls are dialing up risk appetites at the tail-end of a brutal year.
Key Takeaways
Financial planning can be opaque, vague, and perceived as non-valuable by the consumer. I’m about to give financial planning a transparency makeover.
Doll’s Deliberations this week summarizes some short-term expectations and some longer-term issues.
You might think a stock price is just a number, but it has symbolic and practical importance, especially in the US.
Don’t trust analysis from managers that shows they have outperformed an appropriately selected, passive benchmark. That is true for mutual funds, and new research shows it is equally accurate when it comes to endowments and pension funds.
Everyone seems to be paying more attention to the cost of goods and services these days. But there is one cost that many investors pay without realizing it – the cost of taxes on their portfolios. Here's why this cost matters and what you can do to help your clients avoid it.
Owning a mutual fund that’s down 20% or 30% is bad enough. Now, holders of many money-losing investments will be asked to pay capital gains taxes too.
BMO Investments Inc. is introducing a suite of innovation-focused funds that will be overseen by Cathie Wood’s ARK Investment Management, in a bet that investor appetite for growth-centered products will persist even after this year’s slump.
The inflationary tremors shaking Wall Street all year are causing big changes to fixed-income capital flows that could ultimately end up disrupting the money-management industry over the long haul.
There is a long history that proves ESG’s viability and more than 2,000 empirical studies that show little absolute difference in performance by adopting it as a criterion for analysis.
JPMorgan Asset Management, Invesco Ltd. and Dimensional Fund Advisors are among large money managers pushing back against proposals by US regulators to crack down on misleading fund names.
Less than a month after I recommended that an organization – specifically NAPFA – set new membership standards regarding an RIA firm’s revenue model, one has risen to take up the challenge.
There’s no sugarcoating the stock market’s 20% plunge, but there is a small consolation prize: You have one of the best opportunities in years to lower your tax bill.
On Thursday, October 21 stock plunged following a sharp rise in consumer prices.
Corporate executives will have to pay back bonuses based on mistakes in their businesses’ financial reporting under a new rule from the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Is tax drag holding your clients back?
Stocks rose last week (S&P 500 +4.7%) after falling to a 2.5 year low the week before. The increase was attributable to technical and sentiment reasons, but also Q3 earnings reports coming in less bad than feared.
Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities can be a buffer against long-term inflation, but it's possible for TIPS price declines to outpace principal adjustment in the short term.
The difficult capital markets saga of 2022 continued through the third quarter with few safe harbors as rates rose and growth slowed.
Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler won Nobel prizes for their work in behavioral science, propelling that discipline to the forefront of the advisory profession. But new research shows that behavioral science produces results that are no better than a simple model, and mutual funds based on it are no better than an index fund.
In 1987, Sports Illustrated, the preeminent sports periodical of the time, predicted the Cleveland Indians would win the American League pennant in its baseball season preview.
The worst may be behind gold mining stocks. Since hitting a 52-week low on September 26, they’ve risen about 18% and today notched their second straight week of positive gains.
The fourth quarter is starting with a bang for precious metals markets.
Every year, Northern Trust Asset Management issues a multi-asset class, five-year investment outlook known as its Capital Market Assumptions Report. Per the recently released 2023 edition, Northern Trust is expecting market returns to be slightly below long-term historical averages. While they believe lower stock valuations may provide some support, upside will be limited by higher interest rates. They see a somewhat similar dynamic playing out with bonds, where returns will be supported by higher yields that will be capped by flatter global yield curves. Among the six investment themes they’ve identified as driving markets over the next five years are Slow Growth Transitions, which looks at such slow transitions across the globe as pandemic to endemic; globalization to regionalization; and fossil fuels to renewables. Here today to discuss CMA’s themes and forecasts is Chris Shipley.
Most seers believe the US labor market is overly strong.
One investment with the ability to provide current income, inflation protection, and even the potential for capital appreciation has been largely overlooked – rising dividend stocks.
For most of 2022, the VIX been above its average, which historically has led to lower equity returns. I will review the risks that investors face, which explain the continued high level of uncertainty.
“Gold is no longer a safe haven.” “Gold isn’t an effective hedge against inflation.” “Gold is dead.”
As the U.S. CPI data continues to rise, Charles Hamieh, Portfolio Manager at ClearBridge Investments, dives into the opportunity present for investors looking at the infrastructure space as an inflation hedge moving forward.
The municipal bond market has not been immune to bouts of volatility hitting the markets this year, but there are still pockets of opportunity, according to Franklin Templeton Fixed Income’s Director of Municipal Bonds, Ben Barber.
Insurance protects against losses – fires, floods or a wrecked car. Because of the life-altering consequences of such as loss, clients rarely question the cost of the insurance. When viewed through an analogous framework, the cost of lifetime-income insurance, such as a GLWB, is fairly priced.
Bond mutual funds trade daily and are highly liquid, but the underlying securities are often highly illiquid, trading very infrequently. This mismatch means that bond fund pricing is unreliable, creating risks, especially for buy-and-hold investors.
Direct indexing is the fastest growing segment of the asset management industry. In this interview, Brandon Thomas of Envestnet explains how direct indexing helps clients gain low-cost, tax-efficient exposure to asset classes, ESG and quantitative strategies.
Over the years, I’ve explained at length why I’m not interested in forecasts, but I’ve never devoted a memo to explaining why making helpful macro forecasts is so difficult. So here it is.
Dividends and dividend-paying stocks are getting renewed attention in recent months.
A new wave of lawsuits alleges that Blackrock’s target date funds (TDFs) have underperformed. These lawsuits open the door to a related and scandalous breach of fiduciary duty – excessive risk.
“Price matters again in investing,” according to Bob Wyckoff a managing director of Tweedy, Browne. “That serves the interests of value investors.”
Opponents of passive, index-based investing frequently claim that large-cap stocks are overvalued, and a market-cap-weighted index unduly exposes investors to those mispriced securities. That is a false statement.
The world is undergoing a dramatic energy regime shift that has been accelerated by recent events, including the COVID crisis, the Ukraine war, and growing concerns about climate change. The Harbor Energy Transition Strategy ETF was introduced to position investors for this transition.
Investors increasingly want more control and customization of their portfolios. Personalized managed accounts give them the opportunity to do that.
Advisors won the last war – true professionals achieved victory by adopting fiduciary principles and providing comprehensive planning. But a new battlefront has emerged – what I call the “next argument” – and achieving victory will slow and painful.
ESG investing is growing rapidly in retail wealth management. But most of the large ESG ratings providers are focused on institutional asset managers, not retail wealth managers.
Seasoned investors, staring at a world clouded by war, inflation and economic uncertainty, are buying catastrophe insurance at a record clip.
Could a disruptive cash crunch ensue, along the lines of what happened in money markets a few years ago?
People on Wall Street console themselves over the relentless march of passive by downplaying its scale.
What can a person do to mitigate the potential of becoming mired in a life-shattering financial crisis?
Some of the attacks on ESG in 2022 were merited.
Technology has made it possible for us to walk on the moon once again, yet academic research has failed to find a way to identify outperforming mutual funds. But a new study shows that may be possible.
The Federal Reserve’s quantitative tightening program will ramp up to its full potential in September, increasing from $47.5 billion to $95 billion per month.
