Our San Francisco financial planning team (Elissa, Dave, Jennifer, and Jen) attended a Financial Planning Association of San Francisco meeting on Tuesday that featured Gary Schlossburg, Senior Economist for Wells Capital Management, presenting on the outlook for the U.S. economy and financial markets into 2015. We thought…
Everyone by now is aware of the great year that the S&P 500 had in 2013, returning more than 32%, its best performance since 1997. We thought this might be a good time to review the overall performance of our clients’ portfolios for the year, not least…
U.S. stock indices have been hitting new highs in recent weeks, prompting many to ask if the market has become “overpriced” and, if so, what can we do to mitigate risk? In order to answer these questions, there are several others that must be addressed first, including…
No, we haven’t decided to short the stock market — not by a long-shot! — but we have decided to shorten the average maturity of our bond holdings. We’re doing this by swapping all of the DFA 5-Year Global Bond portfolio (DFGBX) into the DFA…
We’ve spent the past two decades discussing with our clients the insights we’ve gained from studying the work of Eugene Fama, University of Chicago professor and one of the fathers of Modern Portfolio Theory. Over that time, we frequently found ourselves referring to him as a “future…
The government has now been “shut down” for 11 days and we face the further threat of a default if Congress fails to raise the U.S. debt limit within a week. While the former is painful, ever more so the longer it lasts, the latter would be truly…
In a recent Barron’s article titled, “Where the Smart Money is Headed,” reporter Beverly Goodman highlights mutual fund manager Dimensional Fund Advisors’ success in attracting a growing number of financial advisors who seek to invest their clients’ money in a more “evidence-based” fashion. The attraction…
We made a few changes to our portfolios this week that we thought we’d share. These adjustments are technical in nature and constitute fine-tuning more than anything else. Bond Allocation Updates As we discussed last month (Managing Risk When Rebalancing Into Bonds), we believe that…