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02 Mar 2018 Turns Out, Most Stocks Fail to Outperform Treasury Bills.

Posted at 10:54h in The Friday Brief by Ryan Smith, CFP®, RICP®, CTS™, MSFP

You may have heard of the 4% rule as it pertains to retirement. It goes like this: If you begin retirement withdrawing 4% of your savings and adjust each following year’s withdrawals for inflation, your money should last 30 years. It may be the most...

21 Apr 2017 Confessions of a Former Active Manager

Posted at 10:00h in The Friday Brief by Sam Bass Jr.

Just yesterday, following a conversation with a client, I experienced an all too familiar tug, not unlike the one an alcoholic might feel at a cocktail party, when the smell of alcohol is rich in the air and that drink is but an order away. During our conversation I learned that Amazon AMZN was now up 21% for the year so far. The broad stock market is up 5.7% by comparison

31 Mar 2017 Are We Talking the Same Language?

Posted at 15:01h in The Friday Brief by Sam Bass Jr.

The financial services industry, like the medical industry, the marketing industry, and the automotive industry, all have their their unique shorthand terms and abbreviations that are clear to insiders, but confuse and obscure understanding for outsiders. It's called 'the curse of knowledge.' Jane Kennedy defines the curse of knowledge as "a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, communicating with other individuals, unknowingly assumes that the others have the background to understand."

24 Mar 2017 The Danger of Not Knowing What You Don’t Know

Posted at 11:41h in The Friday Brief by Sam Bass Jr.

You just bought a new laptop and learned that its operating system doesn't run your most important software. Someone is going to get a very nice birthday present. You're stuck in traffic. After all your research and planning, you're going to miss your vacation flight.