Tag: behavioral-finance

Word Count - 679 Words

Reading Time - ~3.5 minutes

Last week, Blueprint hosted a webinar with our friend Jay Mooreland, author of The Emotional Investor. The event motivated me to reread his book, which I highly recommend. It also reminded me of the investment industry’s annual prediction cycle about what to expect for the coming year and how the market will behave based upon those predictions. Two points here: one, analysts and economists have no idea what is going to happen and two, what happens does not matter to the disciplined investor.  Read on!

Word Count - 703

Approximate Reading Time - 3.5 minutes

So much has been written about the consumption of TD Ameritrade by Schwab that we hesitated to say anything on the subject. However, our experience with elite advisors, investment platforms (TAMPS), and larger RIA consolidation firms leads us to the conclusion that this transaction is just the tipping point in the changing world of custody, and that now is the time for advisors to take a strategic look at all their options.

Word Count - 802 words

Approximate Reading Time - 3 and a half minutes

Recently I answered a few questions for an author working on piece about gratitude in the workplace.  Gratitude has a huge impact on business culture, and I thought the topic was spot on for a blog, especially leading up to this season of gratitude – Thanksgiving. Read on for a few thoughts and observations from the last 50 or so years.

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Lord Henry Wotton, A Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

While Wilde’s masterpiece was published in 1890, there’s much about it that feels prescient today. This quote in particular calls into question the futility of yearning for the possession of material things. Sticking with the theme of 19th-century paragons, it was in 1899 that economist Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption” in his most famous work, The Theory of the Leisure Class. Veblen’s concept can be illustrated by the desire to drive a luxury car rather than an economy car. Though both serve the exact same function, the former calls to attention the apparent affluence of the driver. Both Wilde and Veblen would likely agree that the price of this good exceeds its actual value.

Earlier this month, Jason Zweig wrote an insightful article about Target Date Funds (TDF), which in the last year surpassed the one trillion-dollar mark in assets under management. In the piece, he provided some background on these instruments and how they have been perceived in the market. He concluded by describing the current equity exposure across some of the prominent TDF providers.