Healthcare Spending Is Increasing Faster Than the General Inflation Rate. The changes to what we pay for the goods and services we buy do not increase by the same rate every year; some years they go up slowly, some years … Continue reading →

The only certainty about the future is that it is uncertain.  When it comes to retirement planning, identifying the uncertainties and their potential financial impacts are our best shots at protecting ourselves from those things that could prevent us from … Continue reading →

What we have been experiencing in financial markets the last few years has been truly mind-boggling. We would venture to say that nobody could have come even remotely close to forecasting the combination of events that have played out since … Continue reading →

Since the US stock market bottomed after the Financial Crisis in March of 2009, large cap US stocks have returned around 15% per year.  The vast majority of other investment categories have not enjoyed nearly the returns of the US … Continue reading →

Simply put, stocks have continued to rise in February while growth data has continued to weaken – fairly decisively. If all one cares about is investing in what’s currently going up, then this rally in stocks seems like a no-brainer. … Continue reading →

While we don’t know whether or not the rumblings heard during the 4th quarter of 2018 were just more noise or the precursor of a much larger pyroclastic flow, we thought it may be a good time to revisit the … Continue reading →

We wanted to revisit a blog post from exactly one year ago today that touched on why a rapid rise in interest rates matters for stocks. At the time – Feb 9, 2018 – interest rates had risen over 100% … Continue reading →

When it comes to investing, everybody thinks about progress in terms of returns. This makes sense since without them financial goals are much harder to achieve, but very little time is spent thinking about losses and the role they play … Continue reading →

There’s no question that geopolitical headlines can affect markets on any given day. An escalation of tariff disputes with China, a change in tone coming from the European Central Bank (ECB), tension with our allies in the Middle East – … Continue reading →

Put simply – no, and here’s why. Think about it this way: Stocks at any point in time can be ranked on a scale of one to ten based on how expensive they are. The vast majority of the time, … Continue reading →

For an activity that is supposedly best done using pure logic, investing can be incredibly emotional. There will inevitably be times that test one’s intestinal fortitude and to expect otherwise is envisioning a path that has never existed in financial … Continue reading →

John Pierpont Morgan was known to have said, “Nothing so undermines your financial judgement as the sight of your neighbor getting rich.” Understanding the bigger picture can help us avoid unrealistic performance extrapolation (both up and down) and stay focused … Continue reading →

There’s an old business axiom “You Are What You Measure” and when it comes to investing, there is no shortage of things to measure: returns, risk, alpha, beta, tracking error, and so on. Each has its purpose. Measuring investment performance … Continue reading →

The last few weeks have been very unkind to gold investors with the rather choppy upward trend since the beginning of 2016 being called into question with a seemingly day after day drop in price. From a technical standpoint, gold … Continue reading →

The most recent monthly jobs report came out last Friday and was solid on most counts. The pundits were very excited about it and used it as an example of how strong the economy is and where it’s likely headed. … Continue reading →

On March 22nd we sent a special edition of our monthly Cadence Clips entitled “Was January 26 the Bull Market Peak?” After that S&P 500 peak of 2,873, the index’s value closed at ~2,581 twice: on February 8th and April … Continue reading →

Any investor who has not been 100% invested in the stock market since March 9, 2009 has missed out on some amount of stock market returns. However, everyone knows very few people should ever be 100% invested in the stock … Continue reading →

As a reminder, there are no completely safe places to invest, as nearly all investments have the potential to lose value at times, but there are almost always some investments that are relatively safer than others. The first step in … Continue reading →