Cash is back! It was only a year ago that people were so desperate for yield that the Wall Street Journal asked me if savers should put some of their home down payment savings in the stock market. Now we have high-yield savings accounts topping 3%. Three-month Treasuries are yielding 4.4% and 12-month paper is…
Bear Markets/Crash
After the Harvest
Have you ever seen a grapevine after the harvest? What was recently a huge bush full of fruit, becomes a lonely, barren stick in the dirt. Rows and rows of sticks stretch across the vineyard for months. Winter is not a beautiful time to visit vineyards, but it is a great time to witness the…
A Time to Puke
Today was an ugly day for the stock market. We have officially entered bear market territory for the S&P 500 Index, so we can stop dancing around the words “sell-off”. The arbitrary line in the sand has been crossed. I have spent my career assisting clients through bear markets. I graduated from college at the…
Bear Market Playbook
Although we are not technically in a bear market (the S&P 500 Index has not declined 20%) it absolutely feels like one. The tech-heavy NASDAQ index is 26% off its highs, and so are small-cap stocks. Many of the darling stocks of the latest growth rally have been decimated. These are some of the most…
Flush It Out
It’s brutal out there. We had two very strong down days on Friday and Monday, with no signs of a relief bounce today. The S&P 500 Index closed down another 3.2% on Monday, now down over 16% year-to-date. Everyone expects we will enter official bear market territory, with the averages down 20% or more. CNBC…
Don’t Panic Sell
The markets have been ugly for the past few days. The Nasdaq was down 5% yesterday and is now down over 21% year-to-date. There’s nowhere to hide either. Bonds are having their worst start to a year (-10.79%) on record. Inflation is running at a 40-year high, and the Fed is aggressively tightening monetary policy….
Start Date Randomness
I’ve been the primary advisor to clients for 12 years, and my career in wealth management is approaching two decades. Each client hired me on a different date over those 12 years, and since I joined RWM four years ago, this has been at a pace of about one new client every month. As a…
Get Even-itis
Investors struggle with many behavioral biases, but Loss Aversion is perhaps the bias that poses the greatest challenge. Loss aversion simply means that losses hurt twice as bad as a gain of equal value. This is a concept was first quantified by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in their pivotal 1979 paper titled Prospect Theory….
Is This The End of The FAANGS?
Stocks are off to a rocky start this year. For the first time in a long time, growth stocks are missing their earnings expectations, and their stock prices are falling off a cliff. I had almost forgotten what it’s like to see a company miss by a penny and drop like a rock. Even though…
We Don’t Get to Choose
We don’t get to choose when the market sells off. For most of us, this dip in the market is just another aberration on the long journey from start to finish. But for some, this market correction is occurring at a very sensitive time. An estimated 3 million people have chosen to retire early since…
