When everyone knows something is a fact, I am immediately suspicious. Pundits — and respectable advisors, seers, prognosticators, economists and other ‘experts’ — are all speaking matter-of-factly about the bond bubble. A competitor of ours had four articles in its print edition this week mentioning the bond bubble. I looked around for a differing perspective from someone intellectually equal to the task and Brent Burns, thankfully, stepped into the breach. Read More…
A bond trader friend of mine is fond of saying: Buy bonds, wear diamonds. This may be true but it presumes that you buy them intelligently [so you’ll still be wearing a shirt]. Surprisingly little is written on bond investments relative to the position that this asset class holds in people’s portfolios. The author’s of this article, Stephen Huxley and Brent Burns, offer insight on the topic and will also elaborate on the topic in an upcoming webinar. Read More…
Tailor your investing plan to match your goals, time frame and appetite for risk.
If you had stitched together a sound, well-conceived investment plan before the financial crisis hit, you stood a much better chance of staying invested through the bear market than if you had neglected to look ahead. Then again, as former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson once put it, “Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.” Boy, did we get socked! A Bloomberg survey found that a year after the stock market bottomed, two-thirds of U.S. investors said that their portfolios hadn’t recovered at all. This implies that many people were out of stocks at the market’s bottom, likely because they had abandoned their plans at just the wrong time. Or maybe they bailed because they didn’t have a road map to begin with. (Or perhaps, after taking that knockout punch, they stopped paying attention.) Read More…
It is surprisingly easy to forget that your clients’ investments exist to fund their lifestyles. Clients pull money from their portfolios to pay for living expenses, contribute to college costs, donate to charities and fund estate plans. They may not know exactly when all these outflows will occur, but they have a sense of the time horizons involved. The real benchmark for them, therefore, is whether their money can support their financial goals. Download Now…
When everyone knows something is a fact, I am immediately suspicious. Pundits — and respectable advisors, seers, prognosticators, economists and other ‘experts’ — are all speaking matter-of-factly about the bond bubble. A competitor of ours had four articles in its print edition this week mentioning the bond bubble. I looked around for a differing perspective from someone intellectually equal to the task and Brent Burns, thankfully, stepped into the breach. Read More…
