How Facebook Exploits You & What It Means For Your Portfolio
Facebook is not free. Essentially Facebook earns money by making you do work! Don’t believe me? Check out some of these headlines: Facebook’s making more money per user in North America than ever before Facebook made an average of $6.18 off each user in Q4, more than double three years ago Basically, every time you...Read More
John Bogle – The Missing Narrative
RIP John Bogle – Warrior For The True Free Market John Bogle is dead at 89. Of course, every headline hails him as the founder of Vanguard group and a father of index investing. But in my opinion that really belittles his legacy. No, I am not undermining the impact of Vanguard; it did revolutionize...Read More
New Portfolio Crash Test Scenario: Hard Brexit
If the UK Government fails to approve the deal negotiated by PM May before March 29, 2019, that could trigger “Hard Brexit”. This would potentially cause severe short term (and even long term) market disruption for the UK and Euro region. We believe Hard Brexit has the potential to be very damaging to the UK,...Read More
Case Study: How to Use Comparisons to Alert Complacent Plan Sponsors
Plan sponsors are busy people and generally busy people are actively looking for more things to do. So, it is understandable if a plan sponsor is so content with the current state of their 401k that they don’t welcome the task of dealing with a new advisor who is recommending changes.One of our advisors asked how we could help them get through to a plan sponsor that is resisting the notion that the plan needs changes?
Case Study: Creating Powerful Benchmarking Charts to Illustrate How a Plan Ranks
The Ask: The client wants to be able to better analyze their prospects for their 401(k) business. Our client asked us for help in contextualizing pertinent plan statistics and data points, but they also needed a way to properly frame the data and present it to new prospects in order to win business. The Problem:...Read More
How Amazon of 2018 is Facebook of 2015 & What Happens Next?
Amazon Inc. just passed Apple and Microsoft as the highest valued company in the world. Virtually nobody is surprised by this. But we all should be. After all, this is a company that was consistently losing money only a few years ago. In fact, its current Latest-Twelve-Months Price-to-Earnings ratio is somewhere around 95! Are investors...Read More
15 Weekly Stats for Financial Advisors: Week of January 21, 2019
Matt Meyer and Michael Robinson are founders of The BluePrint Insurance Services. Their mission is to be the premier insurance partner for RIAs and comprehensive financial advisors. The BluePrint provides an operational insurance platform that allows our partners to provide the highest level of insurance access and support. We feature this weekly update with permission:...Read More
Video: A value investor in the world of zero interest rates and high frequency trading
We have done this deep research and created this amazing piece of intellectual deep thinking. Now we know what active value managers felt for the past 9 years! This is a must see!
Hard Brexit vs Cool Brexit: How Will Each Impact Your Clients’ Portfolios?
The news that Prime Minister Teresa May’s Brexit deal was rejected by Parliament was not particularly surprising to anyone, including PM May. But ‘rejected’ doesn’t begin to put the loss in context – the result was the largest parliamentary loss in more than 100 years. This is an incredible outcome given the time and resources...Read More
Case Study: Selecting and Monitoring Target Date Funds
Target Date Funds or TDFs, became a big part of the retirement process. At this point, TDFs represent around 20% of all 401(k) plan assets and approximately 50% of all new 401(k) contributions are directed into TDFs. There are different reasons why TDFs are so popular among the retirement professionals and participants, and why it...Read More