It was a great year for the S&P 500: S&P 500 – up 19% It was a great year for the FAANGs: Facebook - up 53% Amazon - up 56% Apple - up 46% Netflix - up 55% Google - up 35% With such eye-popping returns the FAANGs dominated the list of best-performing S&P 500 [...]
What's the benefit to individuals and society of giving and receiving holiday gifts? The heavyweights of economic thought duke it out for our enjoyment.
...the IRS wants you to know they may not be deductible after all.
Oh those cute TV commercials. They entertain while helping firms become household names. There's no better way to distract current and potential clients from the number of advisers with misconduct on their regulatory records. Should you really trust Ameriprise? Merrill Lynch? Read the full rankings here. Caveat Emptor!
Ostensibly written to explain economic events this article is one of the best you’ll ever read. Understanding what we tell ourselves and why is the first step down a path of better life decisions.
This chart does a nice job showing the prior laws, the competing Senate/House proposals for change and how things were resolved during the reconciliation process to create the new laws to go into effect beginning in 2018. Missing from the chart is discussion of the changes to §529s. Previously distributions in order to qualify for [...]
Takeaways from the above: more than half of American households own no stock roughly 1/3 maintain indirect ownership and with the rise in passive strategies (i.e. indexing) have endowed giants like Vanguard with enormous voting power over corporations Now consider the following: 60% of American families combined own less than 2% of stock wealth [...]
Both the House and Senate passed Bills to reform the Internal Revenue Code. Here's how they stack up as they had into the reconciliation process:
It’s a poor joke but it seems appropriate given data released yesterday by the Hartford Funds. A decade after the deep financial crisis the majority of survey respondents said there was no impact upon their lives. Really? Wow! And yet... 42% of respondents reported that they avoid investing in financial markets 46% have altered their [...]
Yesterday members of the House of Representatives announced their version of income tax reform. The Senate is expected to offer its own version as early as next week. Assuming each passes without changes (and that’s a big assumption) there will still likely be changes as the legislation moves through the reconciliation process before being presented [...]