“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorns have roses.” Alphonse Karr, “A Tour Round My Garden” Most investors have experienced a journey this past seven months resembling a round trip returning them to where they were at the onset of the year. Since the March 22nd market lows, portfolios with a 60/40 equity-bond allocation have generated a 30% return thereby, thankfully, resulting in their having...
Read More
“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 Dow Jones Industrial futures indicate an opening (this is written prior to the market open on July 6th) positive 382...
Read More
“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 23rd was ten weeks ago as measured by time it’s 36% distant as measured by the recovery in the market since that date...
Read More
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 equities and 40% in bonds and cash the returns were approximately -19% in the 1st quarter, +8% in...
Read More
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. Those of us who have counseled patience and to avoid selling into a market panic hope this market rebound continues but some...
Read More
“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 hearing about the Covid 19 virus since mid-January but the market seemed quite content to shrug...
Read More
“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 “Y2K bug” and the possible collapse of the global technological infrastructure’s ability to process payments for years starting with...
Read More
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 ‘Revocable’ Living Trust, which is what we’ll review today. Definition: A Revocable Living Trust is a legal document that an individual owner...
Read More
