Secure Your Estate Planning In Light of SECURE Act Changes
With the SECURE Act now in effect, it’s important for active workers and retirees alike to revisit retirement and estate planning to determine how nuances of this legislation may impact your individual situation. Below for high-level reference is an overview of the key elements of the Act. As we continue to dissect this complex topic, our wealth advisors will provide supplemental insights about specific components
Making Bubbles
Roughly once every decade, investors enthusiastically inflate a dangerous new bubble in the market. Each bubble has its own unique “color”, which further confuses the memory. Using the dates for the bubble peaks, here were the big ones: the commodity bubble (silver, gold & oil) in 1980; the Black Monday program trading crash in 1987; the tech/internet bubble in 2000; and the CDO/housing bubble in
Quick Take: Free Trading—What It Means for You and the Investment Industry
Last week, Charles Schwab Corp announced it would reduce online trading costs for stocks and exchange traded funds to zero. Competitors TD Ameritrade and E*Trade immediately responded with similar offers—meaning, no commissions on trades for client accounts. Fidelity's online brokerage responded in kind just today. Schwab and TD are important partners of ours, serving as custodians for our clients. In this note, we outline the
Is Recession Looming Or Not?
Headlines and media reports recently have sounded a dim drum-beat. In contrast to this negative sentiment, we note that today the Conference Board published their Leading Economic Index (LEI) results for July. The LEI is their measure of business activity, which rose 0.5% for the month. This report followed two consecutive months of negative results. We would call that mildly—though not definitively—encouraging. This rise for
Quick Take: Is Recession More Likely Now? Update on the Inverted Yield Curve
Investors are expressing rising concern about potential recession next year, based on the inverted yield curve in the bond market. We did a comprehensive analysis in March (click here to access that report), providing our view on how to interpret the yield curve, what history tells us about inversion, and how stocks have behaved over the past seven periods of inversion. Our conclusions from that report remain
Smart Money Matters: What the New Retirement Savings Bill Might Mean for You
This summer has seen much popular press coverage of Congress’s attempt to pass legislation improving and modernizing retirement savings plans. Known as the SECURE Act, short for Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act of 2019, the goal of the legislation is to expand the use of retirement savings plans and to update the current rules that dictate contribution and age limitations. Among several