Wall Street is just a street in Manhattan. But “Wall Street” is an industry that preys on your emotions. From the investment guru on TikTok to the former hedge fund trader with an X account to the big investment firms to your stock broker, they’ll do anything to get your attention. They have a story to tell you, a great [...]
#1 Know Where You’re Going Yogi Berra famously quipped that if you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up somewhere else. The first key to successful investing is to figure out where you are and where you want to go. What is your current situation and what are your financial goals, short and long term? You may find [...]
#1 The Financial Advisor Bait and Switch There are hardworking, honest financial advisors. Then there are those who will do a bait and switch. The bait is the promise of low fees and costs. The dishonest advisor proclaims the low fee they will charge for their services. And the upfront fees are low. The switch is in what they end [...]
#1 Hidden Costs Some financial planners and stock brokers have built a business model on hidden costs. Fees are in financial products from mutual funds to annuities. A load mutual fund carries a sales charge that gets paid to the person selling you the fund, as well as a fee to market the fund to others. Another hidden cost is [...]
Forget a gradual decoupling from China. In October, the Biden administration announced new export controls and rules that effectively decapitate China’s semiconductor industry. The ramifications go beyond semiconductors to everything touched by them, including potentially ending nearly all of China’s high-tech aspirations. U.S. companies are now banned from exporting advanced chips to China without special exemptions. But the rules go [...]
The Cleanest Dirty Shirt It’s easy to overestimate the problems the United States faces while underestimating its strengths. The challenges are certainly significant. Politics have seldom been so divisive. The government is running an annual deficit of over a trillion dollars, with a total debt many times that. Inflation has spiked. The Fed has been hiking interest rates at a [...]
In February of 2020, the S&P 500 made a new all-time high of nearly 3,400 points. Then the selloff began that would see an intraday low below 2,200 points. That is a 35 percent loss. But the market has since rebounded recovering to 2,846 points as I write this. This represents an almost 30 percent gain from the low and [...]
A Prognosis for U.S. Stocks The future for U.S. stocks over the next decade appears ominous, regardless of the impact of the Coronavirus. Why? Because valuations matter. And stocks at the end of February were priced for perfection. Any significant negative development was poised to drive them lower. The COVID-19 Virus that shut down the U.S. economy has certainly qualified. [...]
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