June 2015 Monthly Insight: Savings vs. Investing
One of the important tenets of financial and retirement planning is to strategically match your upcoming liabilities (such as college funding, a second home purchase, or retirement income) to assets in your savings or investment accounts. Notice we mention two types of accounts, the savings account and the investment account. It’s not necessary to have two distinct and separate accounts, but you should know that there is a difference between saving and investing. Each is a distinct, yet flexible, strategy for covering future...
read moreApril 2015 Monthly Insight: Takeaways from Warren Buffett’s Stellar 50-Year Track Record
What comes to mind when you hear the name Warren Buffett – investor, mutual fund manager, CEO, entrepreneur, stock picker, philanthropist, or billionaire? Or maybe something else comes to mind? Whatever you think, one thing is clear: he has made a lot of money investing over the years. If you’re counting, Forbes’ 2015 ranking places his net worth at $72.7 billion, which makes him the third wealthiest person in the world behind Mexican telecom king Carlos Helu ($77.1 billion), and Bill Gates ($79.2 billion). Buffett’s success over the...
read moreMarch 2015 Monthly Insight: Maintaining the Course in Volatile Markets
Monday, March 9 is the sixth anniversary of the S&P 500 hitting bottom after dropping over 57% from peak-to-trough over the previous 17 months. In other words, from October 2007 to March 2009 the market dropped 57% and then for no reason anyone can identify and at a time no one expected the fall ended. Just like that, it was over. On that day, the S&P 500 closed at 676.53. The very next day, it was up 6.4%. At the end of February this year, the S&P 500 closed at 2,104.50, up 211% from the March 2009 low. From the chart above,...
read moreFebruary 2015 Monthly Insight: The January Barometer and Portfolio Risk
The January Barometer Historically, the S&P 500 performance in the first month of the year has an 88% chance of indicating where the index will end the year, according to Stock Trader’s Almanac. Since 1950 there have been only 8 years the trend didn’t hold. Although the “January Barometer” has had a strong success rate over the last sixty years, it has not proved to be a good predictor three of the last six years. Thus, you had a 50/50 chance of being right, guessing up or down, for the year following the January results. This indicates...
read moreJanuary 2015 Monthly Insight: Out With 2014 and In With 2015
Since January 2, we have received a deluge of “annual updates” showing where folks should have invested last year. Just when some of us are starting a new year filled with confidence, hope, and faith in a new year, and maybe with passion for new resolutions, we now read how obvious it was a year ago that we should have been invested in just these two or three future top performers. What is it they say about hindsight? The fact of the matter is research strongly suggests no one can accurately forecast the future market direction...
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