“It is wiser to find out than to suppose.” – Mark Twain The morning’s Wall Street Journal is a sort of caricature of how similar our current perception of reality resembles that of a clam shell, joined together with a modest amount of membrane but more separate that together. The...
“Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered” – Jose Saramago, “The Double” May was merry for stock market investors as the S&P posted a +4.8% return with both small cap stocks and NASDAQ doing better still with returns of 6.5% and 6.9% respectively. Though March...
The March stock market decline that few saw coming was followed by a stock market recovery in April that few were expecting. With the S&P down 20% for the year as of March 31st the 12.7% recovery in April leaves the index down 9.85% for the year. For portfolios invested 60% in...
These are VERY difficult days, for investors and those whom they depend upon to advise them. Until this past week every investor who had sold an investment at any time during this past six weeks was glad they had and every investor who hadn’t wished they had....
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at the moment.” Marcus Aurelius At times, the market responds to the news. At other times, the market is THE news. Investors had been...
“History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.” Alexis de Tocqueville First, there was the East Asian Financial Crisis of 1997. In 1998 there was the Russian debt default and the collapse of Long Term Capital Management. In 1999 there were fears of...
The Revocable Living Trust A Living Trust is one of the most flexible estate planning tools in existence. It can be customized to help ensure that actions will be carried out according to one’s intentions while providing for several contingencies. One of the most common types is the...