The Stories of 2023
How could we sum up the market in a year like 2023? If given only a word, resilient might do.
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Blog
Taking a Holistic View of Your Investment Journey
It’s that time of year again. Cooler weather is upon us. Colorful lights are starting to pop up on rooftops. The kids are excited as they count down the remaining days of their fall semester. You guessed it. It’s market forecasting season.
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The Pitfalls (and Benefits) of Overconfidence
Imagine that you are at an interview for your dream job. The interviewer says, “I have 100 applicants for this job. Tell me why I should choose you.” You are an appropriately confident person, not an overconfident one. So, you say: “Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t know the qualifications of the other 99 applicants
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The Certain Uncertainty of Short-Run Economic Predictions
Bloomberg published an article near the end of December last year reporting outcomes from its latest monthly economic survey.1 Survey respondents included 38 economists who each offered a forecast for 2023. Like many at the time, the survey results were generally pessimistic about the economy. The survey’s median estimated growth rate for U.S. gross domestic
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Can Financial Mindfulness Help Enhance Outcomes with Money?
What do you think of when you hear the term “mindfulness?” For me, it’s an iconic image of Don Draper in the final season of the TV series “Mad Men.” The scene presents a lesson in contrasts: Draper, wearing a crisp white button-down, sits cross-legged on the ground with the Northern Californian coastline behind him
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You’re Cordially Invited to a Recital Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Rhapsody in Blue
You’re cordially invited to a joint recital featuring the remarkable talents of Laura Lupinacci, Mezzo Soprano, and our very own, Walter Wisniewski, Pianist, as we celebrate the 100th anniversary of George Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’
Index Concentration: Have Some Indexes Become Too Top-Heavy?
Market indexes designed to represent total stock markets or broad subsets of a market are generally known to offer investors high levels of diversification. Many well-known indices, like the S&P 500® Index and Russell 3000® Index, hold hundreds or thousands of companies. Yet, by some measures, many major indexes appear more concentrated today than ever.
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The Unheralded Contributions of Markowitz to Behavioral Portfolio Theory
“I split my contributions 50/50 between bonds and equities,” Harry Markowitz said in a famous 1998 interview with Jason Zweig.1 Markowitz readily admitted that he did not compute co-variances and draw a mean-variance efficient frontier. “Instead, I visualized my grief if the stock market went way up, and I wasn’t in it —or if it
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It’s Personal: Can Personalization Improve Nudges on Financial Decisions?
The philosophy of “nudging” individuals toward better choices and outcomes, rather than relying on financial incentives or outright restrictions, has become a major topic within the past decade. Financial services companies have enthusiastically adopted nudging, especially for encouraging customers to save more within retirement plans. Typical nudges include defaults in initiating savings and scheduled escalations,
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Focus on the Horizon: Tuning Out the Noise with Valuations and Returns
Valuations of publicly traded companies are a frequent topic of conversation among investors and for good reason. Valuation ratios tell us the price of stocks relative to fundamentals like earnings, sales, and book value. In other words, valuation ratios are an excellent way to understand the long-term attractiveness of groups of stocks relative to: a)
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