Blog

15 Oct 2015 The State Fair, the Best of Times, and the Worst of Times

Posted at 23:44h in The Friday Brief by Jared Korver, CPA, CFP®

[caption id="attachment_7413" align="alignleft" width="300"]

^{Curtesy of: https://www.flickr.com/photos/outofideas/}[/caption] My wife Amy and I are taking our son Miles to the fair this afternoon, and as I thought back to my own State Fair memories of riding bumper cars and watching all kinds of people, I was reminded yet again of the important role experiences play in our lives. At Beacon we have the privilege of helping folks dream about and actually make a reality some really neat experiences, which is a tremendous joy to us.

09 Oct 2015 What are the odds?

Posted at 12:30h in The Friday Brief by Sam Bass Jr.

This past Tuesday night my daughter Langley was filling me in on her upcoming road trip to Florida with her twins. They were bound for their kindergarten teacher’s wedding in Tampa to participate as ring bearer and flower girl. Dad would be staying home with the youngest.

02 Oct 2015 Hurricanes, Economies, Markets, and Butterflies

Posted at 11:02h in The Friday Brief by Sam Bass Jr.

“And a butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean. I believe it. They can even calculate the odds. It just isn’t likely and it takes…so long.”

Robert Redford as card shark Jack Weil in Havana

“In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. The name of the effect, coined by Edward Lorenz, is derived from the metaphorical example of the details of a hurricane (exact time of formation, exact path taken) being influenced by minor perturbations such as the flapping of the wings of a distant butterfly several weeks earlier. Lorenz discovered the effect when he observed that runs of his weather model with initial condition data that was rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner would fail to reproduce the results of runs with the unrounded initial condition data. A very small change in initial conditions had created a significantly different outcome.” The Butterfly Effect - Wikipedia

25 Sep 2015 Dow Plunges Triple Digits

Posted at 14:05h in The Friday Brief by Geoff Hall, CFP®, RICP®

How often have you seen a news headline that looks something like this: “Dow Plunges Triple Digits?” Makes for a great headline, but a better way of saying the same thing is, “Dow Ends Down 0.6%.” Not quite the same attention grabber, is it?

18 Sep 2015 The Way Things Work

Posted at 13:35h in The Friday Brief by Jared Korver, CPA, CFP®

When I was a kid, we had a book in our house (well, we had LOTS of books, but this was one of them) entitled The Way Things Work, which was written and illustrated by David Macaulay. It's a magical book full of all kinds of crazy, hand-drawn pictures illustrating, well, the way things work. From augers to grand pianos to zoom lenses and just about everything in between.

11 Sep 2015 Our Down and Dirty on the World Economy

Posted at 14:13h in The Friday Brief by Sam Bass Jr.

A couple of days ago a friend and client suggested we were just too darned upbeat in our economic briefs. He was right. We do indeed try to see the positive aspects of the economy, leaving the the doom & gloom and the sensational to the ad-selling media.

04 Sep 2015 Ignore Opinions, It’s Earnings That Matter

Posted at 09:08h in The Friday Brief by Sam Bass Jr.

Investing in stocks is the very best way to passively build wealth over a lifetime. But too many think it is more like gambling than sensible wealth-creation. The stock market's gyrations of late can certainly reinforce the argument that it's too risky a bet for the family nest egg.

28 Aug 2015 Fortress America?

Posted at 11:57h in The Friday Brief by Sam Bass Jr.

Can the US economy continue to plow ahead against global headwinds of the slowing economies of China, Europe and the developing world? Can it withstand the rapid devaluation of the oil industry and commodity prices? And most important of all, can it remain healthy during a period of rising interest rates?

24 Aug 2015 Beacon Flash

Posted at 11:23h in The Friday Brief by Sam Bass Jr.

Since its peak on May 21st, the S&P has fallen by nearly 10%. Stocks were pretty well behaved in the weeks that followed Fed Chair Janet Yellen's May speech in which she warned that interest rates would likely begin rising this year. But China's equity slide last Monday became the catalyst for a more significant US equity slide of 5% for the week ended last Friday. As of this writing, stock averages are down another 3%.

21 Aug 2015 Measuring Risk Tolerance Is Not Financial Planning

Posted at 13:30h in The Friday Brief by Sam Bass Jr.

Market cycles, bull and bear, have considerably more impact on our psyche, confidence, and outlook than we perhaps realize. When stocks have risen for a period long enough for us to believe the trend will last, things simply look brighter. We feel more confident about our future, loosen our grip on our money, and feel more comfortable taking risk. With the the Total US Stock market up some 200% since March of 2009, we have had numerous discussions around increasing stock exposure to capture larger returns - it's only normal.