Monthly ArchivesMay 2015

As an investment advisor, I am always looking out at the investment landscape for attractive risk/reward opportunities.  As things stand today, I see limited upside in US stocks and a better risk/reward case for allocating towards European stocks.  The ECB has just begun their quantitative easing (QE) program and has a lot of room to go.  I'm a big fan of Henderson Global Investors and believe they slice and dice data in unique ways.  I have attached their recent report for you to read. Effectively, the reason I like Europe over US and a summary of the slides in the attached presentation are: since government bond yields are low and not likely to rise anytime soon, investors will be forced to ...

Below is a link to a Barron's article which references a 15 year experiment by Paul Merriman where he invested similar amounts of money at Fidelity and Vanguard is essentially the same portfolio.  He started with $100,000 and ended up with $225,650 at Fidelity and $268,359 at Vanguard.  This is a meaningful difference that would only grow over time and would look much larger if he started with more than $100,000.  Most investors don't know what they own, let alone what fees they are paying.  On our website under fees (https://properguidance.com/services/investment-strategies/), we discuss this briefly.  Mutual funds are almost always higher cost than ETF's when you consider soft dollar costs, transactions costs, tax consequences, etc, which they often don't have ...

This is just a quick thought on the Euro and European government bond yields.  We've seen a dramatic increase on a percentage basis on yields in European economies (Germany's 10 year bond went from .08% to over .70% in a manner of weeks) and I've read several articles about reflation and higher inflation expectations off of very little economic data.  While the rise in yields have been dramatic, they've been at extremely low levels and are still extremely low by any standards.  I believe we could see bond yields across Europe continue to rise depending on what language and news surrounds Greece and their willingness to agree to creditor's demands.  I also believe you could see the Euro fall versus ...

I was reading a variety of different articles last night and was brought to a link (included below) which shows all of the outstanding margin debt in the US stock market.  As of March, margin debt hit an all time high of $476 Billion.  Another statistic that isn't reported is all of the pledged loans that occur at the large brokerage firms.  This is regulated under a different section called Reg U (Reg T is for margin) and isn't reported the same way so we can't see the amount of credit that's been extended under these accounts.  In my experience at Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and UBS, they "pushed" advisors to having clients establish pledged loans because the rates ...