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U.S. Stocks

Retirement Uncertainties: Why Financial Planning is Necessary > Issue 6 > The Investment Elephant in the Retirement Room

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You may have to account for at least one, but probably more of the preceding issues before and during your own retirement.  However, the biggest threat that we can think of is also the one that gets almost no attention in the “biggest threats facing retirees” research we conducted, and it illustrates the need for people to work with a professional more than any of the items mentioned in the preceding paragraphs. With the U.S. stock market currently enjoying its longest and largest bull market in history, the potential for large investment losses is very high.   The last two major…

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U.S. Stocks – How Risky is This Party?

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The month of July has seen the broad U.S. stock indexes such as the S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average, and Nasdaq achieve new highs – which of course is a good thing for those with meaningful exposure to them. On the surface it appears that the party is still in full swing. We don’t have to go back very far however for a reminder of how quickly things can go bad and how uncomfortable it can be when losses start to pile up quickly. The fourth quarter of last year saw stocks sink almost 20% while May of this…

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There Will Be A Downside To This Investment Cycle

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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 stock market, however as that is the investing area that receives the most media attention, its behavior over the past ten years has shaped a lot of our expectations for what will happen going forward.  Our brains have a tendency to assume the conditions to which we have grown accustomed will keep going, a tendency which has been labeled “recency…

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Ask Cadence: If I haven’t participated in the stock market gains over the last couple of years, will my retirement be negatively affected as a result?

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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, they’ll score somewhere between 3 and 7 where they’re neither cheap nor expensive. This is where one can have a traditional exposure to stocks based on the timeframe of their goals and risk tolerance. If stocks are scored below 3 and considered cheap, one might take a little more “risk” since over time prices stand a much better chance of…

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Warnings Can Take Time To Play Out

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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 markets. But to some extent, investors do get to choose which type of volatility they are willing to accept. Since the price we pay is the primary determinant of future returns (over longer periods of time), if we invest in something that is expensive relative to its historical norm, there’s a very good chance we’ll take losses eventually – in…

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Thoughts from the Investment Team – This is Where Mistakes Are Made

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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 on those things that truly offer the most opportunity for lasting gain. There’s no more important time than now to look forward rather than backward. This year has been particularly dangerous, not because markets have imploded, but because the way they are moving exposes our psychological vulnerabilities as investors. After a strong 2017, U.S. stocks ran up very aggressively in…

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It Pays To Understand The Indexes

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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 is frequently a two-part process comprised of measuring returns over a designated time period, and then comparing that performance to something. The first part determines your absolute performance, and the second part determines your relative performance; the first part tells you what you did, the second part tells you if it’s good or bad relative to something else. That second…

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Is There a Bear at the Door?

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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 2nd. From top to bottom, that’s around a -10% decline. That special edition went on to discuss the existing conditions, like the unhealthy amount of debt-fueled growth over the past nine years, the small number of large company stocks propping up the indices, and the smaller number of stocks making new highs versus those making new lows, which all point…

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Ask Cadence: If I am not invested in the stock market, am I missing out on these returns forever?

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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 market. Therefore, we are going to miss out on some amount of returns during any period where the stock market outperforms other investment areas. Whether it’s the U.S. stock market or something else, there will always be an investment that outperforms what we own – this is an important concept for investors to grasp. If the risk of an investment…

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Ask Cadence: Where are the safe places to invest if I’m nervous about the stock market?

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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 the process is to identify those places that are most expensive and therefore present the most risk of loss over longer holding periods. Currently those are the world’s stock markets, particularly the US stock market. The next step is to identify those places that offer more value from a risk/reward standpoint and that have a better chance of holding their…

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