2018

Everything is down this year except cash and municipal bonds. Headlines are dismal.  Volatility is rampant.  This isn’t some freak event.  It’s the price of admission. Taken as a whole, yes it is unusual to have almost every asset class down in a calendar year.  What’s not unusual is the negative movements themselves.  Stocks go down.  Bonds go down.  Commodities go down.  Real estate goes down.  They will also go back up.   While the S&P 500 only got a bear kiss (down 19%, not a full 20% bear), we’ll eventually see another full-on bear market.  The longer we go without one, though, the more hysterical the news will be.  Each year that passes without a bear market is a year that experienced, seasoned folks retire and bright-eyed neophytes file in.  We’ve had ten years of this.  If your financial advisor is younger than 32, they haven’t navigated a bear market. …

There are many milestones on the path to adulthood: turning 18, graduating from school, landing that first job, having a baby.  There are also less tangible markers of adulthood such as a shift in our perception of threats.  Saturday morning cartoons implied that quicksand would be a real and ever-present obstacle to daily life.  School assemblies left us wondering just how often we’d be catching fire.  Hollywood warned us about the Commie Reds invading our neighborhoods and training montages.  All of these threats were overblown.  Quicksand and catching on fire are extremely remote issues.  As we all know, Head of the Class planted the seeds of the Soviet Union’s destruction when they traveled to Moscow in 1988.  The USSR only lasted 6 months after the last episode of America’s favorite classroom comedy in 1991. Adult Problems Now that we’re older, we worry about adult things like jobs and babies.  One item…

Spotify’s algorithm recently uncovered a gem (to me, anyway) from my youth, adding Gilby Clarke’s “Cure Me Or Kill Me” to one of my playlists.  I admit that this is not a great song, but seeing as how our musical tastes are developed in our teenage years, this track scratches an itch for me.  It brings me back to laying in bed, headphones cranked too high, listening to 106.9’s Top Ten at Ten.  Tremor Christ, Volcano Girls, Counting Blue Cars, Loser, Andres – all on ROCK ONE OH SEVEN WRQK, CANTON’S ROCK STATION!!! Like our taste in music, our perspective on risk can be overly influenced by our early investing experiences.  Vanguard found that Millennials who started investing with them after the global financial crisis were more than twice as likely to hold zero-equity portfolios as those who started investing before.  They also found that older investors held more equities…