In December 2012, we launched the Sparrow Wealth Management online vault, which provides a secure location for all of your financial, tax, and estate documents. So far, about 60% of our clients have logged into the vault using the username and password that we sent via email. For those of you who haven’t logged in yet, please do so soon! […]
It’s New Year’s Day 2012. In addition to overdosing on televised college football, you’re spending part of the holiday working on the family finances. Armed with a laptop and various online financial tools, you’re on the hunt for appealing stock market opportunities. To prune the list of candidates to a manageable size, you decide to focus on firms that are […]
Much research has supported the benefits of regularly rebalancing a portfolio. It suggests that an investor should start with a target asset allocation and then regularly sell or buy individual holdings in order to keep that allocation steady. For instance, suppose the investor starts with 50 percent in stocks and 50 percent in bonds. A year later the stock market […]
One of the oldest tricks in the investment book is dollar-cost averaging (DCA). This technique suggests that investors will do well over time by slowly investing fixed sums of money into the markets at regular periods. By doing so they will take advantage of the low buying points while not putting too much money in at any one market top. […]
Wow…what an amazing end to an interesting year! Despite a steady diet of bad news, most markets around the world climbed the proverbial “wall of worry” to log strong returns. Major markets around the globe delivered double-digit total returns, and as a group, the non-US developed and emerging markets outperformed the US equity market. The following chart shows the 1-year, […]
Many retirees are claiming their Social Security benefits too early and losing out on their chance to maximize benefits, according to figures compiled by the Social Security Administration. It’s latest statistics covering 2010 show that almost 44 percent of men took their benefits as soon as they were able to at age 62. Another 26 percent took benefits after 62 but […]
The Baby Boom generation born between 1946 and 1964 has dominated investment markets since the 1980s. They struggled for an economic start during the repeated recessions between 1973 and 1982, but then helped to propel an 18-year bull market as they reached their peak earnings power in the 1990s. Now some market observers worry that the Baby Boomers are dragging down […]
Judging by the headlines in the financial press, investors spent much of the past year anxiously awaiting one calamity after another that failed to occur. The plunge off the so-called fiscal cliff was averted. The euro zone did not fall apart. China’s economy and stock market did not crash. The bond market did not implode. The re-election of President Barack […]
