Life and the outcomes of our days can either be seen through the lens of gain or gifts. As I reflect back on this year, there were times, I admit, when I was overwhelmingly frustrated with myself, my work, and my health. When the results of the day didn’t seem to meet my expectations, I…
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Writings
4Q 2023 Market Overview
Market Review My, what a year! Who would have thought the stock market would have ended up 26%? Me either. For the quarter, U.S. stocks returned 12.07% and developed international stocks earned 10.52%. U.S. bonds were up 6.82% and REITs rebounded 15.47% to close out the year up over 10%. After all we’ve been through…
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How You Should Build a Portfolio
You can go down the rabbit whole of building the most efficient or ‘ideal’ portfolio per the textbook. You can look at Modern Portfolio Theory and Mean Variance Optimization. You can run historical data returns and calculate variations ad nauseum then find the exact point on the Efficient Frontier to allocate assets. Of course, the…
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3Q 2023 Market Overview
Market Review This last quarter took a bit of the fun out of the year we were having so far. Markets were down across all asset classes. U.S. stocks were off -3.25%, Real Estate’s quarter drop pulled its year-to-date return into negative territory, and Bonds were down similar to stocks at -3.23%. Do we like…
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Here’s Where to Put Your Money to Maximize Retirement Savings
In grade school math class we were taught PEMDAS (or Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally) as the order of operations on how to attack a math problem. By handling the parenthesis’ and exponents first, you could then tackle multiplication/division and then do any adding and subtracting. Voila! Right answer. By following a process you…
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Land Cruisers, Status, and the American Dream
Toyota Land Cruisers. I first came about these cars while reading a thriller series written by a former Navy Seal, Jack Carr. The main protagonist drives a 62 series Land Cruiser for durability and reliability. Turns out the United Nations believes Land Cruisers are incredibly functional, too, as they are the vehicle of choice for…
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