Trump impeachment trial, coronavirus, earthquakes. Are you stressed yet? Who wants to try and get the snake who started the coronavirus impeached? I bet they’ll find him eventually.

Any given day there’s ample negative headlines to get our hearts fluttering and our emotions in the driver’s seat. In fact, I just did a Google search for “long term stock market chart with negative headlines” as this is one of my favorite graphics and usually works to quell any fears that I’m currently experiencing after losing money (on paper) in my portfolio. I’m not predicting the next direction of the stock market, but accepting that it could go down further. If so, it will not be solely due to the headlines that scare us today, but for a plethora of reasons bigger than us and impossible to fully explain. If the stock market moves sideways for a while before eventually going higher, that’s OK for me as well 😊

I hope you’ll enjoy the graphic and article that I found. It was written by an Australian back in 2018, and coincidentally highlights a few of the same negative events we’re experiencing this year!

Adam Frinsco, CFP^®, CMT

This week’s The Distillery could be viewed as a brief summary of how we at The Advocates view investments. Michael Batnick, of The Irrelevant Investor puts together easy to read data and graphs to help us consider what returns will likely be like in the coming 10 years, especially when considering their current valuations.

Certainly worth a read, especially if you are feeling a bit elated as of late (myself included) due to the growth in your portfolios. To quote Batnick, “We should continue to plan as if our best days are behind us because it’s better to prepare for low returns and be pleasantly surprised than to prepare for high returns and be disappointed.

Enjoy!

Adam Frinsco

Happy New Year and welcome back to work / normal retirement! This week’s The Distillery eases us back into our lives and offers a refreshing and entertaining way to think about the new decade that’s upon us. Now I know that each of you have already listed budgeting, save more, live more, and generally be a better person in 2020 as your resolutions, so we’ll skip those pieces for now and look forward to having those conversations with you in our office this year. Enjoy!

This week’s The Distillery is a GIF, so I think most of us will be happy that it requires little reading. As investors we know that each decade’s returns are completely different from the next, but in case that knowledge has ventured towards the backs of our minds lately with the US continuing to outperform, here’s a nice visual reminder of the last 4 decades.

Happy Holidays!

Our "No Shave November" contest ended at noon today, and the winner is.....

This week’s The Distillery is for those of you who missed our Nest Egg Breakfast with Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA) a few weeks ago. We recorded the event and have posted it here for your listening pleasure.

This week’s The Distillery comes from Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA). If you attended our recent breakfast presentation you know that they trust markets and are not market timers. Enjoy this week’s nice and light piece.

This week’s The Distillery matches up quite well with our sentiment regarding investing domestically vs overseas. Historically, investors have been rewarded fairly equally over time for investing in both parts of the world….except for the last decade. Why? Well we don’t know exactly why, and admittedly, the author doesn’t either. This is why markets are so extremely difficult to invest in. You can have seemingly non-rational markets for a decade or longer, to the point in which you finally blurt out, “this time is different!” Of course at that very moment, the markets will have turned the other direction, reversing previous gains dictated largely by the collective emotions of the herd.

It’s that time of year again, when the days get shorter, but our mustaches grow longer. For the 3^rd year in a row, the men of The Advocates will spend the month of November growing out their facial hair for a good cause. However, during this year’s “No Shave November” we present to you a twist! We would like to invite you to join Read More >

This week’s The Distillery is a bit different in regards to the delivery of the content. A few of us from the office attended a financial planning conference in Austin earlier this week. While there, we had the pleasure of attending a presentation by Shawn Achor, a Positive Psychologist who graduated from Harvard University. Shawn’s company, Aspirant, is dedicated to the study of those people in the population who are happier than the average (i.e. the outliers). From his research he aims to gain insight into how to increase happiness for not only the employees of the companies that hire him, but also for those of us who struggle with lower or average levels of happiness.

Happiness, or lack thereof, affects not only our personal lives and families, but also how we perform in school and at work, which often determines the success / outcome of our financial plans. If you have 12 minutes of time to invest, we hope you enjoy this captivating video by Shawn Achor.