Investment Planning

A December 2016 article on Marketwatch.com reported on a Morgan Stanley survey of investors that listed respondents’ top five financial worries for 2017. In order from greatest to least, these were:

Rules of thumb — whether they address when to plant grass or how long to cook a turkey — attempt to simplify our decision making. However, when it comes to your financial life, following rules of thumb may be unwise.

Many advocate a “back to basics” approach, from grade school educators to the food industry. Think about the original “Reading is fundamental” campaign to the farm to table movement. Simple is better. But is that true of investing?

How can you assess your investment risk tolerance? Like many advisors, we use risk tolerance questionnaires to facilitate client conversations about risk. You can take a look at a popular risk

Every piece of collateral advertising an investment product reads, “Past performance is not guarantee of future results.” Yet, evidence of investors chasing performance clearly illustrates that warning is lost on most investors. In fact, following our natural instincts leads us to apply faulty reasoning to investing.

Well, it may not seem like it when we consider that the S&P 500 Index got off to its worst start ever in the first week of the New Year, but we are in one of the longest-running, broadest wealth-producing bull markets in our history. On March 9th of this year, the bull market in U.S.

In  A Visual History of Market Crash Predictions, Michael Johnston asks that “when wading through the predictions of financial doom and gloom,” that we keep one thing in mi

A recent Microsoft study caught my attention. Highlighting the smart phone-induced deteriorating attention span of humans, it found our average attention span has fallen from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight seconds.

The American Funds recently published the chart I have included below. Its title says it all–Despite Average Intrayear Drops of 14%, Annual Price Returns Were Positive in 31 of 40 Calendar Years. I think that is worth repeating.

Temporary market “failures” like the one we witnessed on August 24, 2015, or the Flash Crash on May 6, 2010, heralded in a flurry of personal finance articles instructing investors to use stop orders to protect themselves from spikes in market volatility.