Social Marketer
David Armstrong has mastered social media, YouTube and blogosphere participation--and most importantly, how it fits together to benefit his firm.
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MEDIA REVIEWS - February 1-7, 2013
You may find yourself nodding in agreement at Deena Katz's column about advisors who have a passion for this business; she argues, persuasively, that you acquire a passion for financial planning (or, really, anything else) as you achieve a high level of mastery. The magazine's cover article offers a very brief review of different consequences of the new tax regime, and Joel Bruckenstein offers his view of the new Windows operating system. Allan Roth talks about the elephant in the living room as far as the investment markets are concerned; just exactly when are bond rates going to rise and deliver a lot of nasty surprises to investors and clients? And what can you do about it? (Believe it or not, he has an answer.) Finally, Joni Youngwirth offers one of the best "last word" pieces you are likely to see; it gives advice on how to help your employees be more helpful to you.
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MEDIA REVIEWS - January 24-31, 2013
I have to say, I really REALLY like the adaptive withdrawal rate concepts proposed in the final article of this month's issue of the Journal, and wonder why such a gem was buried deep in the very back of the magazine. It appears, to me, to be the most elegant withdrawal methodology model we have yet developed as a profession, allowing clients to compare their current situation with a timeline graph, and adjust their spending accordingly.
I also really liked the Bill Winterberg article on "pull" (vs. "push") marketing, which seems to put the whole social media marketing discussion into a nice context. And Dan Moisand's efforts to recommend a good financial planner to a friend in a part of the country where he doesn't know anybody is a classic: if one of us can't figure out how to tell, from the outside, a good financial planner from a sales guy posing as one, how is the public ever going to make these judgments?
Finally, Harold Evensky's column is, as usual, extremely informative about the best recent research coming out of academia. [Read more »]
I also really liked the Bill Winterberg article on "pull" (vs. "push") marketing, which seems to put the whole social media marketing discussion into a nice context. And Dan Moisand's efforts to recommend a good financial planner to a friend in a part of the country where he doesn't know anybody is a classic: if one of us can't figure out how to tell, from the outside, a good financial planner from a sales guy posing as one, how is the public ever going to make these judgments?
Finally, Harold Evensky's column is, as usual, extremely informative about the best recent research coming out of academia. [Read more »]
MEDIA REVIEWS - January 16-23, 2013
After investors virtually wrote off the American economy (and markets) last year, only to receive double-digit returns, I'm inclined to believe Evan Simonoff's evaluation that America may be the world's most interesting success story. The story is flawed, but look at the rest of the globe. Whose isn't these days?
Mitch Anthony tells us that a financial planner's primary role is to inspire people to reach their goals, and dispense wisdom. Brian Hamburger, who faced down hurricane Sandy, reiterates the importance of having a disaster recovery plan, and Joel Bruckenstein offers up the latest technology announcements from the Schwab organization--which lately has been talking a lot but not always doing very much in this arena. Finally, Scott MacKillop, of Frontier Asset Management, argues that academic research into the markets is book-smart but not street-wise; that is, it does a poor job of evaluating the inefficiencies and human differences among investment managers in the real world. [Read more »]
Mitch Anthony tells us that a financial planner's primary role is to inspire people to reach their goals, and dispense wisdom. Brian Hamburger, who faced down hurricane Sandy, reiterates the importance of having a disaster recovery plan, and Joel Bruckenstein offers up the latest technology announcements from the Schwab organization--which lately has been talking a lot but not always doing very much in this arena. Finally, Scott MacKillop, of Frontier Asset Management, argues that academic research into the markets is book-smart but not street-wise; that is, it does a poor job of evaluating the inefficiencies and human differences among investment managers in the real world. [Read more »]
MEDIA REVIEWS - January 8-15, 2013
Financial Planning magazine is surely going to be criticized for publishing a list of the largest RIAs and excluding all dually-registered firms, some of which are fully the equal of many of the firms you read about here in terms of service and sophistication--and some of which will be fee-only before long. The accompanying article talks a lot about conflicts and doing what's right for the client, which adds insult to injury. However, the desire to be included in these rankings might provide a small additional incentive for some of those firms to make the short leap out of the FINRA world. Interestingly, the accompanying article about custodians is not nearly so exclusive; independent BDs are listed alongside the institutional custodians who serve fee-only advisors.
Ed Slott does his usual great job of explaining how to avoid unseen pitfalls, this time the 3.8% Medicare surtax on investment-related income for above-average-earning taxpayers. And Allan Roth looks at the growing number of very low-cost ETFs, and sorts out those occasions where low-cost may not be the only criteria to evaluate on. [Read more »]
Ed Slott does his usual great job of explaining how to avoid unseen pitfalls, this time the 3.8% Medicare surtax on investment-related income for above-average-earning taxpayers. And Allan Roth looks at the growing number of very low-cost ETFs, and sorts out those occasions where low-cost may not be the only criteria to evaluate on. [Read more »]
The Fallacy of Forecasts
The next time you see a Wall Street guru predicting the future, turn the channel.
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The Fiscal Cliff Act
Here's the details on the new tax bill
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The Death of Alpha?
Institutions are starting to replace their search for above-market returns with increasingly sophisticated beta exposures.
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Asset Class Act
AssetBook may be the most sophisticated--and easiest to use--portfolio management software program in the advisor space.
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The Next Wave
How can advisory firm owners do a better job of implementing the great ideas they are exposed to at conferences and in their peer interactions?
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The Lesson We Have To Learn Over and Over
The world is our best teacher, if we have the wit to understand her lessons. And 2012 provided, for me, one of the best, clearest and most useful lessons of my brief career in this profession.
I think we can all say with confidence that 2012 was not one of those happy time periods where the world seemed to be shining with opportunity and optimism. There was the Libor scandal, the continuing saga of the Eurozone credit mess, miserable jobs reports and painfully slow recovery from the Great Recession that is now 4 years behind us and still casting its shadow over our economic growth and psyches. Morgan Stanley and Jon Corzine found creative ways to make billions of dollars evaporate. After all the negative advertising in the runup to the highly-partisan Presidential election, I sometimes felt as if the end of the world was upon us. And then came the fiscal cliff debate.
I find myself wondering: How can such an awful year have turned out so great for investors? When people of the future look back at their investment history, they'll probably think of 2012 as one of those bright, happy years for U.S. stocks. The Wilshire U.S. Large Cap Index provided us with a 15.75% return last year, and all the various other indices, domestic and foreign, were up at least 13%. Eurozone stocks rose an aggregate 17.45% for the year.
No doubt, those people of the future will think of 2012 as a time when we were confident about our economic future and the direction of the markets. Haven't you heard it said that it's easy to invest in those years when the markets are generating double-digit returns?
The lesson I take from this is that it really is never easy to stay invested, and only in retrospect can we say that any random 12-month period was a good time to hold stocks. Most of the friends and neighbors I talked to about the markets were asking me how to hedge against the possibility of a dramatic drop, or a recession, or some unnamed catastrophe that would occur if we elected one or the other candidate for President. At professional conferences, it was much the same. The conversations were often directed toward taking money off the table and skepticism about the future.
We can learn from 2012 what we could have learned in any random year, but perhaps the lesson was clearer in the past 12 months: that it is very hard work to keep your clients invested even in the years which, in retrospect, turn out to have been generous. There will always be things to worry about, and manifold indications that the future is not bright. The next time I look back at those years when the markets delivered above-average returns, I'll know that the people who actually received those returns were pretty brave, and had a lot of doubt, uncertainty and headlines to ignore, even if we don't remember them today.
I have no idea what 2013 will bring, but the odds in the investing casino are pretty good: seven out of ten years deliver positive returns. I have learned all over again, perhaps more clearly now, that trying to predict what's going to happen in the swirl of global headlines is not a game I want to engage in. Many of us were fearful and perhaps a little depressed this past year, and yet we got a pretty darned good return on our stock investments. This coming year, I'll take the odds. And I'll predict, here and now, that in the coming 12 months, there will be myriad great reasons not to own stocks, and many great arguments that the end is just around the corner.
I'm willing to bet all comers that 2013 will be another tough year to stay invested--and that if we have another year of double-digit gains, most of us will soon, again, forget how tough it was. [Read more »]
I think we can all say with confidence that 2012 was not one of those happy time periods where the world seemed to be shining with opportunity and optimism. There was the Libor scandal, the continuing saga of the Eurozone credit mess, miserable jobs reports and painfully slow recovery from the Great Recession that is now 4 years behind us and still casting its shadow over our economic growth and psyches. Morgan Stanley and Jon Corzine found creative ways to make billions of dollars evaporate. After all the negative advertising in the runup to the highly-partisan Presidential election, I sometimes felt as if the end of the world was upon us. And then came the fiscal cliff debate.
I find myself wondering: How can such an awful year have turned out so great for investors? When people of the future look back at their investment history, they'll probably think of 2012 as one of those bright, happy years for U.S. stocks. The Wilshire U.S. Large Cap Index provided us with a 15.75% return last year, and all the various other indices, domestic and foreign, were up at least 13%. Eurozone stocks rose an aggregate 17.45% for the year.
No doubt, those people of the future will think of 2012 as a time when we were confident about our economic future and the direction of the markets. Haven't you heard it said that it's easy to invest in those years when the markets are generating double-digit returns?
The lesson I take from this is that it really is never easy to stay invested, and only in retrospect can we say that any random 12-month period was a good time to hold stocks. Most of the friends and neighbors I talked to about the markets were asking me how to hedge against the possibility of a dramatic drop, or a recession, or some unnamed catastrophe that would occur if we elected one or the other candidate for President. At professional conferences, it was much the same. The conversations were often directed toward taking money off the table and skepticism about the future.
We can learn from 2012 what we could have learned in any random year, but perhaps the lesson was clearer in the past 12 months: that it is very hard work to keep your clients invested even in the years which, in retrospect, turn out to have been generous. There will always be things to worry about, and manifold indications that the future is not bright. The next time I look back at those years when the markets delivered above-average returns, I'll know that the people who actually received those returns were pretty brave, and had a lot of doubt, uncertainty and headlines to ignore, even if we don't remember them today.
I have no idea what 2013 will bring, but the odds in the investing casino are pretty good: seven out of ten years deliver positive returns. I have learned all over again, perhaps more clearly now, that trying to predict what's going to happen in the swirl of global headlines is not a game I want to engage in. Many of us were fearful and perhaps a little depressed this past year, and yet we got a pretty darned good return on our stock investments. This coming year, I'll take the odds. And I'll predict, here and now, that in the coming 12 months, there will be myriad great reasons not to own stocks, and many great arguments that the end is just around the corner.
I'm willing to bet all comers that 2013 will be another tough year to stay invested--and that if we have another year of double-digit gains, most of us will soon, again, forget how tough it was. [Read more »]
MEDIA REVIEWS - January 1-7, 2013
Bob Clark nails it when he says that incoming (possibly temporary) SEC Commissioner Elisse Walter is "the most pro-Wall Street commissioner ever," narrowly winning that honor away from her predecessor--and making it clear that, against all logic, brokerage house insiders are running the regulatory arm of the wirehouses' main competitors in the marketplace. Does that make sense to ANYBODY?
Meanwhile, this issue of Investment Advisor is heavy on practice management: a summary of the most most recent "Growth by Design" survey, Mark Tibergien talking about how so many advisors look alike to the consuming public, Angie Herbers breaking down the consequences of a profession with too few younger advisors, and Tom Giachetti listing ways that you can pass SEC inspection on the issue of protecting client data. [Read more »]
Meanwhile, this issue of Investment Advisor is heavy on practice management: a summary of the most most recent "Growth by Design" survey, Mark Tibergien talking about how so many advisors look alike to the consuming public, Angie Herbers breaking down the consequences of a profession with too few younger advisors, and Tom Giachetti listing ways that you can pass SEC inspection on the issue of protecting client data. [Read more »]
A Year of Anxiety (And Excellent Returns) - Year-End Report
Why was this such a great year for investors?
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