Quarterly Commentary, Q3 2017
The U.S. economy saw slightly weaker growth during the third quarter with a 2.7% GDP estimate, down from 3.10% during the second quarter.
4 Tips for Investing After an Election Season
Presidential elections bring heated emotions from both sides, especially when it comes to protecting your financial investments. As humans, we’re often driven by these strong feelings, but it may come as a surprise that they usually don’t have a large impact on financial markets.
Dividend-Paying Stocks: The Legend, the Myth
There is a myth that is pervasive in the investment industry that most historical investment gains are attributed to dividends and the stocks that pay them. If this were true you could make a case for owning only dividend-paying stocks.
Chasing Returns: Part Two – Avoiding Recency Bias
What is “recency bias”? It comes from the field of Behavioral Economics and represents a tendency for some people to focus solely on "what's happened lately" when evaluating or judging something.
With a Little Help from My Friends
A popular Beatles tune contains the lyrics, “Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends.” These comforting words of wisdom can apply to many aspects of life, including the investing world. Sometimes it takes the help of a few friends to provide better solutions for clients, and that’s exactly what happened back in 2003.
Free Lunch
A common expression in life is, "There's no such thing as a free lunch." In other words, it’s virtually impossible to get something for nothing. However, in our approach to investing, there are a few “free lunches” that we’re able to exploit and feed to our clients.
Ten Things All Successful Investors Should Know
You should know if your investment advisor is a Fiduciary. A registered investment adviser has a Fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of the client. In the words of the U.S. Supreme Court “... to continuously occupy an…
Have Broad Diversification
The rewards from investing can be captured most consistently by creating a well-diversified portfolio that is engineered to optimize the risk/reward trade-off inherent in the stock market.
Include Value Stocks
The fundamental axiom of modern portfolio theory is that risk and return are related. Investment strategy is defined as the science of capturing the maximum return at a stated level of risk. The asset class of value stocks represents a distinctive risk for which we expect compensation. When the risk and return characteristics of value stocks are blended with other asset classes, the result is a diversification benefit. Therefore, including value stocks in a broadly diversified portfolio is expected to increase return while reducing risk.
Include Small Cap Stocks
There are only two reasons to add an asset class to your portfolio. Either you want it to reduce risk or you want it to add return. Adding small cap stocks to a portfolio of large cap stocks can do both. Small cap stocks have provided returns with a different performance pattern than large cap stocks. In addition, small cap stocks have...