Emerald Insights: Empowering You with Knowledge and Clarity
Timely guidance, educational tools, and curated content to support confident financial decisions.
Wild Horses, Outer Banks, NC
Corrections are part of Normal Markets
The first quarter of 2018 started out much like most of 2017. That is until January turned into February. With the turn of the calendar, it seemed as though stocks fell off the side of a mountain.
Pullback, Correction or Bear Market?
People like using labels to describe stock market volatility. Generally speaking, most pundits describe a decline of less than 10% as a pullback, a decline of 10% to 20% as a correction and any decline greater than 20% as a bear market.
The Year of the Dog
In February of 2018 the Chinese Zodiac Calendar flips to the Year of the Dog, specifically the Year of the Brown Earth Dog.
We Call it the Golden Rule but Others Call it the Fiduciary Rule
There is a new law affecting the delivery of investment advice that is currently being phased into the regulatory mosaic of the financial services industry by the Department of Labor. The new law is known as the Fiduciary Rule.
The First Question You Should Always Ask when Seeking Financial Advice
There has been a battle going on in Washington about how investment advice pertaining to your retirement savings will be delivered going forward.
Trying to Reason with a Hurricane Season
The updated map shows the latest foretasted track of Hurricane Irma and all active tropical tracks and models pertaining to the event.
Watching the FANGs for an Entry Point
According to Bespoke Institutional, stocks broke a 58 day streak of trading without a market move of over plus or minus 1% on August 10th. Since then stock market volatility has picked up some but not dramatically.
Stocks and Bombs
For the last week or so the conflict of words between North Korea and the United States seems to have changed from a rapid boil to a slow simmer, giving equities a boost during the first half of the week.
Do You Really Want to Sell This Market?
According to Bespoke Investment Group, the NASDAQ dropped over 2% for the first time in 100 trading days on Wednesday (5/17/17).
Investment Highlights - April 2017
The 1st quarter of 2017 started out optimistically on the part of investors as the surprise “Trump Rally” paused and then resumed in hopes of (on the part of the stock market) deregulation and tax cuts.
Is the Stock Market Really Overvalued?
With the strong bull run in stock prices since November, we have been reading more from the perma-bear community about how overvalued the stock market is.
2017 Outlook - Predictably Unpredictable
Anybody who has been in the investment business long enough knows the futility of forecasting financial events – especially when looking way out into the future.
Building a Better Bond Portfolio
A well constructed bond portfolio can stand-alone as a total portfolio or as part of a broader asset allocation strategy. There are many reasons that an investor might choose to allocate some or all of their investment capital to fixed income securities.
The Valuation Bears Have it Wrong
In today’s low return environment, investors are scrambling to find higher yielding investments in order to fund future or a current liabilities like retirement, the purchase of a second home, or a college education.
How the Election Could Affect Your Investment Portfolio
It seems that every election year the pundits bloviate on why this cycle is different than any other election year in history. It appears that the talking heads might be right this time.
What You Don't Know about Investing
I recently got around to watching The Big Short. I thought the movie was so good that I immediately downloaded the book to my Kindle. For anyone who hasn’t seen the movie or read the book I would certainly put both at the top of your summer list.
Deciding when to take your Social Security
One of the most common questions I get from people entering the retirement phase of life is, ‘when should I take my social security benefit?’
What's in Style on Wall Street
Whether your game is growth or value, momentum, low volatility or indexing, strategies with strong academic underpinnings generally work out if they are implemented properly and if they are given enough time.
Better than Bonds
Some years back I used to enjoy reading a research report that was published periodically by Credit Suisse called “Better than Bonds”. The concept of the report was fairly straight forward as I remember it.
First Under Statement of 2016 - January was Rough!
If 2015 was flat and boring for investors, then 2016 has ushered in an unwelcome change to volatility and losses. We thought it might be helpful if our friends and clients could see the stock market through our eyes.