You all know we are a financial planning firm, investments are but a piece of your overall planning. Having said that, once a quarter we do let the investment folks have their time in the sun and allow them to share their thoughts. Hope you find Rene's quarterly commentary helpful. It has been 5 days [...]
Groucho Marx famously said… “I would never want to join a club that would have me as its member” Similarly, banks love nothing more than to lend to borrowers who have no need to borrow. And the high-net-worth clients of banks’ brokerage or wealth management units are an obvious object of their affection: the portfolios they [...]
Should we fear a replay of the 1970’s High-Inflation era? Today’s jobs report points to an unemployment rate of 3.7% - the lowest since 1969, the year when the worst outbreak of inflation began to be felt. From 1969 to 1982 inflation spiked to 7.3% annually and wrecked stock and bond returns – which were negative [...]
A significant portion of our client’s portfolios are invested in the US Bond market, so I wanted to put the current Federal debt picture in the appropriate perspective. The punch line is that we are not on the cusp of The Financial Apocalypse as some pundits will have you believe. With the help of our Bentley [...]
At Single Point we believe that index-tracking funds offer the best outcomes over high-cost stock-picking funds. As the number of trackable indexes has grown over the years – especially beyond the core Large Cap S&P500 Index - we spend a great deal of time identifying the best index to track the complimentary or ‘satellite’ asset classes. [...]
A full-blown trade war, though unlikely, would be very damaging to equities. What happened? President Trump announced that he plans to impose a 25% tariff on imported steel and a 10% tariff on imported aluminum. Why does it matter? A ‘full trade war’ is not something we have seen since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 [...]
Every year the big Wall Street banks publish their year-end targets for the S&P500. Think of these as a gauge of Wall Street’s collective wisdom. Their well-paid researchers crunch a ton of market and economic data. I will save you the suspense – their forecasting ability would be laughable, if it wasn’t for the fact that [...]
Rolling your 401(k) or 403(b) retirement balance into a broker's 'managed IRA' program is too often the wrong choice done for the wrong reasons. 'Financial Advisors' will justify the roll-over based on claims of broader choice, greater control and simplification at no extra cost. More often than not, these arguments are based on incomplete disclosures of [...]
The ability of traditional Mutual Fund stock-pickers to deliver out-performance has been decaying for 2 decades. A recent WSJ editorial by renowned finance scholar Burton Malkiel sites the most recent stats published by Standard-&-Poor's and they are absolutely ugly. •“More than 90% of active US managers under-performed their benchmark indexes over a 15-year period.” •“Over 85% [...]
Of the 46 previous declines of -10% or more in the stock market (S&P500), a little more than a third (19) became bear markets, defined as a drop of at least -20%. Most of the -10% pull-backs – as sharp and painful as they are - turned out to be just false signals and momentary detours [...]
