Well-known investor Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital has often said, “You can’t predict, but you can prepare.” While markets are cyclical, oscillating between bull and bear markets, you can never know with certainty when the market is going to turn, how quickly it may do so, how far it might fall, or when it will [...]
Related posts on Investing in an Inflationary Environment: Deeper Dive into the Mechanics of Series I Bonds What are TIPS and how do they work? Sell Bonds in Inflationary Environments? Your end of year to-do list is already overflowing. You have to prepare and send holiday cards, put up lights, get the holiday-themed lawn ornaments [...]
The two most important reasons to own high quality bonds in a portfolio are to provide diversification and to provide capital preservation. A catchy opening line, if there ever was one. Several big finance words (like diversification and preservation), an unexciting topic (bonds), and a subjective statement that may not seem to have actionable implications [...]
A respected portfolio manager presented recently at an investment symposium where she explained an investment strategy that has consistently maintained zero correlation to stocks. Several times during her presentation, she described why the strategy should be expected to maintain a near-zero correlation to stock markets in the future. During the break that followed, financial advisors [...]
Few things in our profession are more frustrating than when financial advisors deliver bad financial advice. It doesn’t have to be that bad financial advice is dishonest or delivered for the wrong reasons (like it is so often, for the benefit of the advice-provider). It is just that misguided or blatantly wrong financial advice hurts consumers and [...]
Spend any time working in the kitchen of a restaurant and you will think of restaurants very differently going forward. Following a short experience in a restaurant kitchen during college, I’ve never once sent a meal back for being undercooked, overcooked, or even the entirely wrong order. Use your imagination and we can just leave [...]
There should be natural skepticism when a financial advisor creates a list of the best and worst questions to ask a financial advisor. It sounds a little like game show fixing of the 1950s where some contestants knew the questions before they were asked. However, experience provides a unique advantage. We have heard insightful questions and we have [...]
At various points in life, individuals begin to avoid roller coasters, back flips off the high dive, cartwheels, and full contact football. They take more frequent breaks in their weekly tennis game and aspire to completing a marathon rather than finish one in less than 3-hours. Instead of travelling to Spain to run with the [...]
Much has been said or written over the past decade about the future direction of interest rates. Nearly everyone has an opinion on the subject including professional investment managers, CNBC correspondents, your golfing partner, and the person who cuts your hair. We like to make investment and financial planning decisions based on what is known [...]
