Are investors paying too much in investment taxes? Can you help them create better after-tax outcome? Without a basic understanding of the individual tax forms, it can be challenging to critically analyze. Given this is the first tax year to reflect the Tax Cut and Jobs Act, there are a few changes advisors should understand to better prepare for reviewing clients and prospects tax situations relative to their investments.
A simple, but yet extremely effective way to help save clients money and gain their trust is to provide cheaper highly correlated ETF alternatives to their mutual fund investments. Raltin runs 2.5 Billion correlations on all combinations of 40,000+ ETFs, mutual funds and stocks to find the most correlated ETF to mutual funds. Just go to Raltin.com and and search for the mutual fund to find ETF alternatives. For example, Raltin’s page for T. Rowe Price Blue Chip Growth Fund Inc (TRBCX) shows that the iShares Russell Growth ETF (IWF) has a 0.97 correlation to TRBCX.
The corporate bond market has declined in quality when viewed through the lens of published ratings, and that has been transmitted to passive alternatives.
Research group Metals Focus released its Gold Focus report this week forecasting that global gold demand will climb to its highest level in four years. Plus, economist David Rosenberg shares what he thinks ballooning nonfinancial corporate debt means for investors.
Just because the market is celebrating the Fed’s policy u-turn doesn’t mean volatility is a thing of the past. Disconnects between fundamentals and assets prices don’t make for market stability.
The municipal and the Treasury yield curves are different. This is never more evident than when the Treasury curve inverts. There have been multiple historical incidences of Treasury 2's to 10's inversion in the last quarter century...
The Non-Energy Minerals Sector is mostly comprised of very cyclical and typically commodity-based companies. Consequently, very few companies in this sector offer the consistency and predictability that prudent and/or conservative investors might require.
U.S. stocks experienced their biggest quarterly gains in nearly a decade. The S&P 500 completed its best quarter since 2009, gaining 14%, while the S&P MidCap 400 and S&P SmallCap 600 gained 14% and 12%, respectively.
“Ark Invest” is a money management firm that manages money in ETFs, mutual funds, and separately managed accounts. Ark believes that innovation is the key to growth and alpha.
Qualified Opportunity Funds are a new investment opportunity designed to drive development in economically distressed areas. They come with significant tax benefits, but the holding requirements and other risks mean they aren’t suitable for all investors.
Worried about retirement but don’t know how to start building wealth? Dollar cost averaging allows you to put a long-term plan in place and let compound interest work its magic.
If you own the S&P 500 (or long-term bonds), you implicitly think one of several things is true…
Read Harold Evensky's latest NewsLetter.
Last Friday I spoke to a number of money managers. One of the attendees was Linda Bradford Raschke, a professional trader, who used to trade on the Pacific and Philadelphia Stock Exchanges, founded a number of hedge funds, well you get the idea.
Turns out price matters for excess returns, and that what’s worked before doesn’t necessarily persist into the future. “Many factors aren’t real.”
Today stocks erased their weekly gains and bond yields fell. Chief among the contributors were a Treasury yield curve inversion, the first since before the financial crisis, and continued slowdown in the pace of U.S. manufacturing expansion.
In a widely expected outcome, the Federal Reserve announced no change to the Fed funds rate but did leave open the possibility of a rate hike next year.
A long time ago in a galaxy far far away I began working on Wall Street. The year was 1971 and I had joined a small firm making markets in over-the-counter stocks and options. My salary was $100 a week and it was Camelot.
Through “harmonization” – the broker-dealer community, aided and abetted by the SEC, is destroying the fiduciary standard, while imposing only new “casual disclosure” obligations upon broker-dealers. At its very core, this is an effort to make RIAs/IARs and BDs/RRs look identical. Once this is accomplished, FINRA will swoop in to seek oversight over the “harmonized” broker and investment adviser communities.
Last week, I described the enormous challenges retirees face. One reason for that, aside from insufficient savings, is that markets haven’t delivered the returns many experts said we could plan on.
There has been a lot of commentary as of late regarding the issue of corporate share repurchases. Even Washington D.C. has chimed into the rhetoric as of late discussing potential bills to limit or eliminate these repurchases. It is an interesting discussion because most people don’t remember that share repurchases were banned for decades prior to President Reagan in 1982.
We update a spending-power indicator that has an excellent track record predicting the economy.
When Donald Trump was campaigning, he said he would eliminate the national debt in eight years. But it has increased by $2 trillion in the first two years of his presidency, leading Jeffrey Gundlach to conclude that we are “on the road to a large debt problem.”
As tempting as the proposition might be, there isn’t convincing evidence that a style-timing strategy will be profitable.
As I wrote on Friday, the weak economic outlook from the ECB, continuing reduced earnings estimates, worries about the Mueller Report, renewed Chinese trade war tensions, and the underperformance of the cyclical sectors bringing on cries of recession all proved too much for stocks...
Want to build a diversified, tax-efficient, and low-cost income fund for your clients? Here’s a surprising way to do that with a broad-based index fund like the S&P 500.
In this issue, Research Affiliates assesses risks facing the All Asset strategies and shares insights from its CEO on fostering a winning corporate culture.
I found more value in the Finance Sector than I did in any other sector that I screened. All in all, I identified 131 attractively valued companies out of the 1,888 companies in the Finance Sector.
Gene Podkaminer oversees one of the largest offerings of multi-asset products in the financial industry. He is a senior vice president in head of multi-asset research strategies at Franklin Templeton. In this interview, he discusses the three trends that will drive investment returns in 2019.
Joel Bruckenstein and I have completed and published the T3/Inside Information Software survey, which addressed the three issues that most advisory firms want to know.
The Tweedy, Browne Global Value Fund (TBGVX) has an exceptional track record, outperforming its benchmark and peer-group average by over 300 basis points annually since its inception 25 years ago. I interviewed the members of Tweedy, Browne’s investment committee.
Sacagawea lived from May 1788 to December 1812. She was a Lemhi Shoshone woman who is best known for her help guiding the Lewis and Clark Expedition in achieving their mission objectives by exploring thousands of miles from North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean.
There’s a major misalignment of expectations between the client and advisor when it comes to risk, and it’s not the client’s job to solve the problem. The whole risk conversation has to change.
I was traveling last week seeing portfolio managers and doing gigs for our financial advisors and their clients. I have been doing such events for much of the past six months. The recurring question from clients is, “What about the national debt?”
Caveat emptor: current technical supply and demand flows favor issuers more than buyers. But diligent, disciplined investors can always find attractively priced, fundamentally sound bonds.
Corporate results in the fourth quarter of 2018 were good, but not great: sales grew 6% and earnings rose 32%, but profit margins fell hard. Expectations for 10% earnings growth in 2019 have already been revised down to 5%. This still looks too optimistic...
Despite Friday’s Fling, there was a very negative NYSE breadth divergence which appeared during the final two hours of trading. It feels like a blow off trading top to me.
We take issue with some of the recent reporting on passive investing. In the spirit of Bogle’s own approach of straight talk and no-nonsense thinking, we felt compelled to offer a differing viewpoint.
A powerful alternative to the ubiquitous style grid is to organize managers by the investment strategy that a fund pursues. Once constructed, these statistically valid peer groups provide a comprehensive framework for portfolio construction, manager evaluation, fund selection, benchmarking and, quite surprisingly, stock selection and managing market exposure.
When considering the prospects for India's stock market, key factors of performance are the growth outlook and underlying valuations.
According to research from Cerulli, nearly half of advisors use a model portfolio to manage $2.7 trillion in assets. We’ll discuss how those models are permeating all aspects of investment management in the financial advisory industry.
A popular song and a recent article in The Wall Street Journal reminded us of Edmund Burke’s quote and how important history is to the long-term success of common stock ownership.
We revisit this “Who do you trust” meme this morning because of what I have been saying the past few weeks. After identifying the selling climax low of December 24, when 48.5% of stocks made new lows, I recorded two 90% upside days (90% of volume and upticks came on the upside).
In this issue, Research Affiliates assesses the potential impact of a bear market in U.S. stocks on emerging markets and discusses regulatory reporting requirements.
Public pension plans are destroying investors’ wealth by allocating assets to separate account managers, private equity and hedge funds.
Early on in my career, I learned there are four psychological reasons investors buy (listed from strongest to weakest).
Today’s late-cycle environment gives investors an opportunity to re-evaluate the risk and return potential of their portfolios. Since the depth of the financial crisis, core stock and bond allocations have delivered exceptional returns with modest volatility. But future returns will likely be muted even as risk increases.
While investors should be cognizant of the complexities and risks around Brexit, they should be just as aware of the opportunities in select U.K.-based businesses.
Unexamined thinking about where numbers come from and how they work will lead to dangerous math mistakes. This article will show how to make your advice less precise but more helpful.
So, I need to apologize to everyone for not being able to do a verbal recorded call last week, or write a missive the last three sessions of the week. The problem was that while in NYC my media events began around 6:00 a.m., followed by more media events, then it was portfolio manager meetings.
