The second quarter (Q2) of 2024 continued this year’s A Tale of Two Markets: AI Versus Everyone Else. Large indexes like the S&P 500 performed well but this was driven primarily by a handful of large companies. Otherwise, market breadth was mixed with performance growing worse as company size grew smaller. Bonds also continued their tale of woe while experiencing a couple of positive glimmers during the quarter. Here’s a roundup of how major markets perfo…

Your beneficiary designations matter and are easily overlooked, sometimes for years. You list them on your retirement accounts and life insurance contracts, and maybe on your bank and brokerage accounts. If you skip this step, perhaps assuming you’ll handle it later, the default option is often your “estate”, meaning your accounts have to go through probate. We’ve discussed this in prior posts over the years but this concept is worthy of repetition. The paperwork…

Over the past several weeks we covered a handful of year-end considerations with the last being partly related to generating cash. In that post I mentioned how money market funds and bank CDs were great places to store cash. Let’s dig into that a bit this week. This is especially important because the short-term interest rate environment that drives this space is changing. I tend to lapse into jargon when discussing these topics and some of that is unavoidable. My…

With all the talk lately about the negatives associated with inflation I knew eventually folks would start asking about something positive, such as a potential bump to Social Security benefits. Inflation can’t be all bad, right? As you may be aware, Social Security benefits are eligible for a cost-of-living adjustment (or COLA) every year based on how inflation looks during the third quarter compared with the third quarter of the prior year. If it’s positive, even…

Maybe bitcoin grows up to rule the world someday. Possible but unlikely. Whatever its future, it’s not going away, so the question is what to do about it. Should you own bitcoin? If so, why? FOMO is a real and powerful force and is also not a good enough reason. There needs to be more. As I mentioned some time back, I’ve been delving deeper into the emerging digital assets space trying to answer these questions. My research led to some interesting and novel places…