General Information
Not Quite Ready Yet
Good morning. The Iran War grinds on, and oil prices remain elevated this week. The stock market has mostly been looking past this because corporate profits have been coming in strongly during this earning season. That has helped investors flip their attention away from war and back to growth…
A Better Way to Phish
Good morning and Happy Tuesday. Last week I talked about my desire to slow my professional adoption of AI due to privacy concerns. This has to do with wanting the various privacy issues to solidify more before considering allowing these technologies to interact with your information. Call me…
Protecting Our Information
I try to be an optimist but it’s scary out there. Pick your category and you’ll find more than enough detail to keep you up at night.
Among the variety of things I worry about, fraud risk is high on the list. It just seems so easy these days. Maybe because on the one hand it can be so basic, like…
A Few Updates
It felt like the start of another busy week as I wrote this yesterday morning. Aren’t they all busy? We have new tariffs on trading partners, renewed war in the Middle East impacting oil prices again, and we have a Fed interest rate decision on Wednesday.
Here are some updates along these…
What I Don't Do
Before I begin, this will be my last post for a few weeks. I’ll still be working on everything else, just not writing this blog so that I have some extra time with family and friends during what remains of summer.
I’ve probably mentioned this several times in the past but part of what I do for…
Conference Update
I spent most of last week at a conference in Denver so, if you’ll indulge me, I’ll share some of the details with you.
This conference was the Insider’s Forum that has for years been hosted by a long-time thought leader in the planning industry. One of the draws for this conference is how…
Bond Review
Before we talk about bonds, Schwab has received reports matching up with one of my posts from earlier this summer about how fraudsters are leveraging AI to make it easier to rip you off. The idea is you’re contacted by someone purporting to be a Schwab employee who needs to verify suspicious…
What I Do
A couple of months back I wrote a post about several things I don’t do when working with clients. I talked about avoiding using leverage, not buying private investments, and not letting third parties handle client portfolios. While making choices about what not to do is a foundational part of…
Schwab and AI
There was a lot of news as we began the week.
First was a big election upset in Brazil leading to that country’s market having its worst open, I think ever, down around 25%. Prices improved but still closed down by around 20% for the day. Yikes.
We have another Fed meeting tomorrow but, as I…
Politics and Market Returns
With this being Election Day, I wanted to share some links to interactive maps where you can view predictions and, eventually, election results. You may already have a resource for this but just in case not, I like 270towin this season.
The links below are to the House and Senate pages, but the…