Insights

Some things are just too difficult or stressful to do on your own. Like a dietitian or a personal trainer, a financial advisor can help set up the right plan for you, then monitor and motivate you so you end up with the results you want. There are four key benefits to working with an advisor: Competence: Financial advisors provide the critical actions that help drive successful long-term outcomes, including planning, asset allocation, rebalancing and working with other financial professionals. Coaching: An advisor offers education and
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Procrastination. At some point or another, it plagues us all. We put off folding the laundry, returning that library book, starting to compost, and, of course, myriad tasks related to our financial lives. Whether it’s filing your taxes or upping your IRA contribution, many a financial to-do is put off until tomorrow—and there is often a price to pay for procrastinating. Sure, in some cases it’s because the task is unpleasant, but as it turns out, a more cerebral explanation
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What a difference a few months can make! A few months at the end of 2018 turned U.S. stock returns negative and made international stocks to decline further for the year. Now, just a few months after that recent low, stocks in the U.S. and abroad have staged a significant recovery. U.S. stocks (represented by the S&P 500 Index) declined -13.5% in the fourth quarter of 2018. After the first two months in 2019, they were up 11.5%. This pattern
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Over the last several years, index funds have received increased attention from investors and the financial media. Some have even made claims that the increased usage of index funds may be distorting market prices. For many, this argument hinges on the premise that indexing reduces the efficacy of price discovery. If index funds are becoming increasingly popular and investors are “blindly” buying an index’s underlying holdings, sufficient price discovery may not be happening in the market. But should the rise
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Investors may be tempted to extrapolate recent returns into the future, which can lead them to abandon their investment philosophy at potentially inopportune times. While negative outcomes are disappointing, investors should view them with the proper perspective and stay the course. When you leave your server a tip, do you round it to a whole-dollar amount and often in multiples of $5? Does a 60th birthday seem more significant than a 59th? If you answer yes to these questions, you’re
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