Yesterday, Sam, Jared and I were out around town and had multiple people ask us about the recent craziness in the stock market.  If you're not caught up with what's been going on here's a quick update.  On Tuesday the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 272 points.  The next day it rose 274 points only to plummet 300 points on Thursday, marking the Dow's most erratic 3 days since August 2011.  It would appear that our old friend Volatility has come back for a visit.  So, what’s causing all the commotion?

Yesterday, Sam, Jared and I were out around town and had multiple people ask us about the recent craziness in the stock market.  If you're not caught up with what's been going on here's a quick update.  On Tuesday the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 272 points.  The next day it rose 274 points only to plummet 300 points on Thursday, marking the Dow's most erratic 3 days since August 2011.  It would appear that our old friend Volatility has come back for a visit.  So, what’s causing all the commotion?

I'm here to free you up from that awkward moment at the cocktail party when you ask the guy next to you what he does for a living and he responds, "I'm a financial advisor."  After 18 years as a financial advisor I've learned to embrace that awkward silence when the person I'm talking to pauses momentarily, presumably waiting for me to solicit their business.  The financial industry has created this phenomenon for itself by focusing more on product sales and stock market prediction than good solid advice.  Fortunately, our society has come up with a clever way to break that silence in the form of a question.  "What's the stock market going to do? "

If you visited the Yahoo Finance web page on Wednesday, you may have seen this headline: "Dow 6,000: Wild prediction or worthwhile caution?" The article behind the headline is about a guy named Harry Dent. Dent has made a number of market predictions over the past few decades--his...