Articles on Wealth Management Topics

It's no secret that the popularity of exchange-traded funds, or ETF's, has sky-rocketed since the very first one, the S&P 500 SPDR, was introduced more than 25 years ago. Investment flows continue to pour into these vehicles, and ETF sponsors continue to oblige investors by rolling out a never-ending stream of new products. The dark side of this onslaught of ETF introductions is that record numbers of mutual funds are also closing, and fund closures can have serious repercussions for the investors owning them.

Financial advisors vary widely in the business models in which they operate and in the standards of care that they owe to clients. These factors determine the quality of advice provided, and of products recommended, by any given financial advisor as much as his/her education, experience, and professional designations.

Now there are almost 1800 ETF's being traded in the U.S., a remarkable number considering that there are less than 4000 companies listed on exchanges here. To distinguish themselves from the competition and to attract investment assets, these fund sponsors have stopped at nothing to slice and dice the financial markets in innovative, and in many cases just plain silly, ways.

The Certified Financial Planner (CFP®) designation is the most widely recognized certification for financial advisors. However, CFP® certificants vary enormously in the regulatory environments and business models in which they operate. These differences have tremendous implications for the quality of financial advice that a consumer should expect to receive from a given CFP® practitioner.

In the last installment of Articles on Wealth Management Topics, we discussed academic research on different ways to estimate the magnitude of future stock market returns. As a refresher, the worst of the ways studied was to extrapolate future returns from past returns. Nearly as ineffective is to base estimates of future returns on surveys of individual and institutional investors.

Returns in financial markets are often cyclical. That is, multi-year periods during which asset classes or investing styles or mutual fund sectors succeed in generating above-average returns are usually followed by multi-year periods of disappointing returns, and vice versa. Since this market behavior is a key tenet on which our contrarian investment philosophy rests, let's explore the academic research supporting it and the ramifications for successful long-term investing.

After having played political ping-pong with them for almost a decade, Congress finally made qualified charitable distributions (QCD's) a permanent feature of the tax code late in 2015. And that's a good thing: (a) for those who consider their IRA required minimum distributions to be an unneeded and tax-inefficient nuisance, (b) for charitably-minded retirees, and (c) for charities in general.

The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 was a mixed blessing for investors and retirees. As in most bipartisan compromises, there was plenty to dislike in that budget agreement. It did away with a couple of coordinated Social Security claiming strategies, "file-and-suspend" and "filing a restricted application", that were deemed by the Administration to be unintended loopholes.

Roth 401(k) contributions are especially advantageous to younger workers still looking forward to their peak earning years. And for higher-paid employees, Roth 401(k)'s may be the only way for them to contribute to Roth-style accounts. Now here's a way - courtesy of some fairly recent clarification from the IRS - to potentially supercharge the pace of your contributions to Roth-style accounts at the workplace, regardless of whether or not your employer offers a Roth 401(k) feature.

One of the major factors to consider when deciding whether to rollover a retirement plan account to an IRA is investment flexibility. An IRA typically allows its owner almost unlimited investment flexibility. In contrast, a 401k, 403b or 457 retirement plan account-holder is constrained to choose from among the menu of investment options made available by the plan's sponsor and service provider.