Entries by Steve Booren

Improving Investor Behavior – Act Like an Owner

Most business owners can feel the pulse of their business. If you own a coffee shop for instance, you can go to the location, see and interact with your employees, touch your inventory, and keep your customers happily caffeinated. You can smell the aroma of your business. You can feel it.

What if you had that same feeling as a shareholder of a public company? What if you thought like an owner?

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The Difference Between Financial and Investment Advice

With the advent of technology, real financial advice will be a huge differentiator in the financial services industry. Anyone can create a portfolio, asset allocation or investment strategy. We are even told robots can do this with this concept called “Robo-Advisor”. What most people actually need is advice about how their investments fit into their overall financial plan, and more importantly their life. Believe me – robots cannot do this, nor do investment products do this. It takes an experienced, skilled, listening Advisor.

Both investment management and financial advice are necessary components for long-term success, but it’s important to understand the differences. So let’s compare and contrast the two.

What is “Normal”?

Over the last ten days the stock market has experienced higher levels of volatility than we’ve seen in some time. The result has been many headlines highlighting the downfall of a strong market. It’s left many people wondering if this is normal and healthy, or a sign of worse things to come. But what is […]

Are You Fiscally Fit for 2018?

Are you ready to become “fiscally fit” for 2018? We want to help you work toward making this a successful and prosperous year, so we updated our checklist with pointers for getting a head start on the new year.

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2017 In Review

At the end of every year I enjoy taking a look back. As you probably know, I’m a big believer in perspective and investing for the long term. And though our ability to look forward in time is still a work in progress, our ability to look back and gain some perspective is always valuable. So as we wrap up 2017, I want to take a look back at some of the major events that defined the year.

Living to 85? Will Your Money Keep Up?

Did you know there’s an 80% chance that a 60-year-old couple will have at least one spouse reach the age of 90?

And about 1-in-10 adults will live past age 95, according to the Social Security Administration. That’s a problem for most investors. Few retirement plans account for such a long period (sometimes more than 30 years!) of time.

So the typical question becomes: what’s going to last longer, you or your money?

Market Up or Down: Your Income Should Not Change

If the market dropped 10% during your first year of retirement, how would that affect your income? What effect would a 5-year bear market have on your plans? These are the questions we encounter time after time. Investors want to understand how to protect their retirement from the ever volatile swings of a volatile market, […]

The Crystal Ball of Context

The advisors at Prosperion don’t make short-term market predictions – you see, we don’t have a “crystal ball”. Like you, we aren’t sure when the next market correction (or major upswing for that matter) is going to happen. But we can say with certainty that one will happen… eventually.

Mid-Year Outlook 2017 – A Shift in Market Control

The LPL Research team proudly presents Midyear Outlook 2017: A Shift In Market Control. Thus far in 2017, an important shift has taken place in this economic cycle. The Federal Reserve has shown increasing trust that the economy has recovered and that market forces can keep it steady. The gauges say growth engines and market drivers may have changed: power down monetary policy, power up business fundamentals, and potentially take fiscal policy and economic growth off standby.

The Right Perspective

Today I want to address what I believe is the very core for successful financial behavior – an optimistic disposition.

2016 is a great example of why it is so important to have an optimistic perspective. The optimists “won” and pessimists “lost”… again. Whether attempting to follow financial folklore such as, “as the first week of January goes, so goes the market for the year”, or that saying “sell in May and go away”… speculators who believe in superstition and let it influence their actions are bound to fail.

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2016 Taught Us These 3 Lessons

If 2016 has taught us anything, it is to expect the unexpected. So as we wrap up a rollercoaster of a year, I find myself looking back to three surprises and the lessons they taught us. In the same way the bottom of a cup is revealed only when the liquid is quickly stirred, sometimes it takes a whirlwind of the unexpected to remind us of a few simple truths.