January 14, 2019

At year-end, mutual fund companies often distribute gains to shareholders in the form of capital gains distributions. Even if the fund is down for the year, shareholders may have a tax liability in their taxable accounts. These distributions are sent to investors via check, automatically deposited as cash to their brokerage account, or reinvested into the issuing mutual fund.  For those investors receiving the cash distributions, many see them as welcome arrivals - year-end bonuses, if you will.  It's not quite that simple.

November 15, 2018

I recently read an article in an industry journal¹ titled: “You Can’t Win if You’re Afraid to Lose.” The tagline was: “To experience higher potential gains, clients need to be willing to tolerate occasional losses.”

August 15, 2018

I can’t say it takes up a lot of our day, but John and I do spend a little time answering a similar question using a variety of the same answers: “NO”, “I don’t think so”, “Have you really thought about this?”, and “Is this is the same brother-in-law that you told me last year was a loser and good-for-nothing?”

What’s the question you ask? “I’d like to invest some money in (fill in the blank on the latest investment opportunity).”

August 15, 2018

A few years ago, Carl Richards, author of “The Behavior Gap: Simple Ways to Stop Doing Dumb Things with Money,” wrote a column¹ in which he advocated that financial advisors should play small ball with money they manage. It’s directly related to this issue’s Stan’s World, so we took it out of the archives, dusted it off, and will use it to explain further why our asset management process so closely resembles small ball.

May 15, 2108

Brunner Opticians has been a landmark in Westfield for more than 75 years. When we first moved to Westfield, I was the proud owner of three pairs of new eyeglasses I couldn't use because the prescription was incorrect in all three. I looked for a local optometrist, found one at Brunner, and made an appointment to see if he could figure out what had gone wrong.  He did a thorough eye examination, wondered why my previous prescription was changed, and voila, vision problem corrected.

February 15, 2018

Clients are sometimes surprised when we respond “no” when they ask if we saw a market drop coming. While we all may realize a market drop will eventually occur, we can never predict when that might happen. Though the volatility that returned to the stock market in early February was sudden and dramatic, it wasn’t altogether unexpected considering the exceptional run this market has had.   

February 15, 2018

By: John Zeltmann

You've probably noticed that Bitcoin has been in the news lately. While Bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency (a cryptocurrency is a digital currency), it’s the most well-known, and the hype around it may bring back memories of long lines to buy Beanie Babies. But more than a few people use cryptocurrencies to conduct transactions over the internet, with companies such as Microsoft, Expedia, and Intuit accepting cryptocurrency for payment.

June 30, 2017

Snapchat has been in the headlines recently.  At first, they were the darling of the initial public offering (IPO) space, with investors clamoring for a chance to purchase the company stock.  The first act of that play ended on a high note: on the day of their IPO, March 2, 2017, the stock price finished up 44%, rising from an issuing price of $17 per share to later close at $24.48.  Not a bad way to send the audience off to intermission.

Then came Act 2.  

May 15, 2017

You may recall reading about the VIX Index in this space, which many view as a type of fear gauge for Wall Street.  According to a recent article in the New York Times¹, for the first time in more than 10 years, it dipped below 10, which means investors don’t anticipate an imminent market decline. (The historical average of the VIX is around 20.)  With the market near record highs, and the VIX near record lows, contrarians must be licking their lips in anticipation of the windfall they think they’ll make. Their logic: everyone is happy, so nothing good can come next. But contrarians are not always right; they just tend to take the opposing view.

March 31, 2017

The market’s recent gains since the presidential election have led some investors to conclude that we must be approaching a market bubble. Mark Hulbert, writing in Barron’s¹, says “Not so fast.”  A recent academic paper² defines a bubble “as a price increase of at least 100% over a two-year period followed within the subsequent two years by a drop of at least 40%.” By that definition, there have only been two bubbles in our history: the market that peaked in 1929, and the dot-com bubble that peaked in 2000.