June, 2023

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How to Invest if You’re Sitting on a Pile of Cash Right Now

A Wealth of Common Sense

A reader asks: My wife and I are 42 with a 13-year-old son. We moved to Phoenix, AZ as immigrants 7 years ago with just a couple thousand dollars to our name. Since then have slowly progressed in our careers. At this point, here’s what we have accomplished financially: Annual combined income: $350k Cash in checking accounts: $230k Mortgage: $530k (28 years left) Investments through 401k, 529 plans: $100k Stock Ma.

Investing 139
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Nobody Knows Anything, 2023 First Half Edition

The Big Picture

A quick note as the first half of 2023 draws to a close, shocking the locals with its intensity. Why? Because almost nobody saw this rally coming. 1 As of this moment, the indices stand appreciably higher than where they were on January 1, 2023: The NASDAQ 100 is up >38%, the S&P 500 is up ~15.5%, and the Russell 2000 small cap index is up almost 7%.

Numbers 322
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Wealth.com Debuts ‘Ester,’ An AI-Powered Estate Planning Legal Assistant For Advisors

Wealth Management

Wealth.com's Ester is a proprietary model that can read and restate documents and hold both short and long-term memories of previous client actions.

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“Today’s market pivots from a funeral to a party as fast as a VFW hall.”

The Reformed Broker

Please read this from Michael Santoli: Just as the depth of despond evident in investor-sentiment gauges around Labor Day was out of proportion to what the market and economy had been doing, the volume of cheer engendered by this four-week, 9% rally looks to be running at least a bit ahead of what has, after all, been a marginal upside exit from a long, grinding trading range.

Marketing 351
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Less Stress, More Success: Accounting Best Practices & Processes for 2025

Speaker: Amanda Adams, Fractional CFO, CPA

Are you ready to elevate your accounting processes for 2025? 🚀 Join us for an exclusive webinar led by Amanda Adams, a seasoned fractional CFO and CPA passionate about transforming back-office operations for finance teams. This session will cover critical best practices and process improvements tailored specifically for accounting professionals.

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Top clicks this week on Abnormal Returns

Abnormal Returns

Also on the site Why we all need regular doses of Vitamin O, i.e. optimism. (abnormalreturns.com) Top clicks this week Warren Buffett's advice on active vs. passive investing is clear. (monevator.com) Joshua Brown, "The thing that everyone’s talking about is not always the thing that ends up mattering." (thereformedbroker.com) What the CIA can teach investors.

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This is Why You Stay the Course

A Wealth of Common Sense

Last year was one of the worst years ever for financial markets. Call it recency or loss aversion or some other Daniel Kahneman bias but for some reason, our brains are hard-wired to assume big losses will be followed by additional losses (just like we assume big gains will be followed by additional gains).1 The thing about big losses in the stock market is sometimes they are followed by big losses…but sometimes t.

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Americonned

The Big Picture

@TBPInvictus here: Contrary to 40+ years and counting of “trickle down” narrative, the reality is that the gap between the 1% and everyone else (let’s say the bottom 90%) has never been wider. It’s become a chasm, and the charts below tell the story. Here is the wealth share of the bottom 90% and the Top 1%, equalized in 1989: Here is both the share (scale at Left ) and level (scale at right) of total net worth held by the Top 1%.

Numbers 332
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Diving Into the Performance of Factors

Alpha Architect

Researchers have raised questions and led to research into how many factors are needed, the replicability of originally reported results, and the decay of factor performance over time. Diving Into the Performance of Factors was originally published at Alpha Architect. Please read the Alpha Architect disclosures at your convenience.

Investing 144
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The Day the Treasury Topped

The Reformed Broker

The parabolic spike in 2-year Treasury bond rates this winter ended with a crescendo on Thursday, March 9th and Friday March 10th. That week, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank had thoroughly spooked the markets and convinced traders that the Federal Reserve would be forced to start downshifting its hiking cycle and the accompanying hawkish rhetoric.

Banking 346
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Avoiding Lease Accounting Pitfalls in 2025: Lessons Learned from Spreadsheet Errors

Speaker: Abdi Ali, Sr. Lease Accounting Consultant

Join this insightful webinar with industry expert Abdi Ali, who will discuss the challenges that can arise from managing lease accounting with spreadsheets! He will share real-world examples of errors, compliance issues, and risks that may be present within your spreadsheets. Learn how these tools, while useful, can sometimes lead to inefficiencies that affect your time, resources, and peace of mind.

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Top clicks this week on Abnormal Returns

Abnormal Returns

Top clicks this week Two reasons why the stock market has surged this year. (thereformedbroker.com) Five common portfolio mistakes including 'portfolio sprawl.' (morningstar.com) The spread between the 10-year Treasury and the dividend yield on the S&P 500 is at its highest level since 2007. (capitalspectator.com) Fund fees really do matter. (humbledollar.com) A round-up of recent charts including a surge in investor sentiment.

Portfolio 274
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Weekly Initial Unemployment Claims at 264,000

Calculated Risk

The DOL reported : In the week ending June 17, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 264,000 , unchanged from the previous week's revised level. The previous week's level was revised up by 2,000 from 262,000 to 264,000. The 4-week moving average was 255,750, an increase of 8,500 from the previous week's revised average. This is the highest level for this average since November 13, 2021 when it was 260,000.

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The Stock Market Will Pick the Winners For You

A Wealth of Common Sense

The AI craze is in full effect so everyone is trying to figure out who the winners will be. Maybe it will be the upstarts, some new start-up that gives you your own personal assistant in your ear, on your iPhone and at your desk. Or maybe it will be the big tech players who have gobs of money to throw at AI like Microsoft, Google and Facebook. Maybe it’s a company like NVIDIA that supplies the chips and software.

Marketing 143
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Ramit Sethi on Living Richly

The Big Picture

 This week, we speak with entrepreneur Ramit Sethi, who is the founder and chief executive officer of the online education platform I Will Teach You to Be Rich (IWT ), which attracts more than 1 million readers a month. Sethi is also the host of the Netflix series “ How To Get Rich ,” which is based on his New York Times bestselling book “ I Will Teach You to Be Rich “; he also hosts a podcast of the same name.

Education 332
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Back to Basics with Reconciliations

Join us in this webinar, where we share best practices on how to think about the reconciliation work each month, when best to do reconciliations, how they should be prepared, and some common pitfalls to avoid. Learning Objectives: This course objective is to understand how to properly prepare and review balance sheet reconciliations and its impact on the financial statements.

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The Compound and Friends: We Are Ready For Prime Time

The Irrelevant Investor

Today’s Compound and Friends is brought to you by Flourish: Thanks to Flourish for sponsoring this episode. Go to flourish.com to learn more about cash solutions for advisors. On today’s show, we discuss: Cathie Wood on NVDA stock ARKKs house view on AI and NVDA NVDA valuation updates ARKKs NVDA position since inception Big Tech’s biggest bets (or what it takes to build a billion-user platform) Company.

Valuation 135
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Black Swans, Stock Market Crashes and the Chaos Kings

The Reformed Broker

On this special episode of Live from The Compound, Scott Patterson, Financial Journalist and Wall Street Journal Reporter, joins Michael Batnick and Josh Brown to discuss Scott’s new book, Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis. Follow Scott on: Twitter Book. The post Black Swans, Stock Market Crashes and the Chaos Kings appeared first on The Reformed Broker.

Marketing 268
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Podcast links: the science of sleep

Abnormal Returns

The biz Consolidation is here, again, as independent podcast companies sell out. (bloomberg.com) Ad buyers love podcasts, especially business-focused ones. (insideradio.com) The number of songs uploaded to streaming services just keep increasing. (om.co) Finance David Rubenstein talks with Cliff Asness about the return of value. (bloomberg.com) Christine Benz and Jeff Ptak talk with Joel Tillinghast about his biggest investing mistake, the implications of AI for portfolio management, and how pri

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New Home Sales increase to 763,000 Annual Rate in May

Calculated Risk

The Census Bureau reports New Home Sales in May were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate (SAAR) of 763 thousand. The previous three months were revised down slightly, combined. Sales of new single‐family houses in May 2023 were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 763,000 , according to estimates released jointly today by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Sales 145
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2024 Lending Outlook: Innovations and Evolutions in the Financial Sector

As we step into 2024, the lending landscape evolves rapidly with technology, regulations, and market dynamics driving change. For banks and financial institutions to stay competitive and meet the evolving needs of their customers, these drivers must be understood and engaged with. Lenders can anticipate significant transformation fueled by technological advancements, regulatory shifts, and changing consumer behaviors.

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The Evolution of Financial Advice

A Wealth of Common Sense

To be a successful investor you need to possess a number of different traits. You need to understand how math, statistics and probabilities work. You need to understand corporations and the global economy generally function over the long haul. You need an understanding of how the different asset classes behave from a risk and reward perspective. You also need a deep understanding of financial market history from booms to.

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MiB: Gretchen Morgenson on Private Equity

The Big Picture

This week, we speak with Gretchen Morgenson, senior financial reporter for the NBC News investigative unit. A former stockbroker and alumna of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, she won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her “trenchant and incisive” reporting on finance. She (and coauthor Joshua Rosner) recently published “ These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs―and Wrecks―America.

Taxes 324
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Improving Performance by Avoiding Negatives of Index Replication

Alpha Architect

There are several significant, well-documented benefits of index funds. In addition to outperforming a large majority of actively managed funds, they tend to have low fees, low turnover (resulting in low trading costs and high tax efficiency), broad diversification, high liquidity, and near-zero tracking error (generally assumed to mean that they incur negligible trading costs).

Taxes 126
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We are Austin-bound June 12th

The Reformed Broker

RWM is coming to Austin, TX June 12th-14th @Downtown with more detailsEmail us at info@ritholtzwealth.com subject line “Austin” to reserve a meeting slot! pic.twitter.com/9iSdG4HFf3 — Ritholtz Wealth (@RitholtzWealth) May 19, 2023 I’m headed out to Austin, Texas this June and bringing a whole bunch of my Ritholtz Wealth Management colleagues with me, including our financial planner in the area.

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Banking on Loyalty: Holistic Financial Advice for Unparalleled Business Growth

Speaker: Joe Buhrmann, MBA, CFP®, CLU®, ChFC® Senior Financial Planning Practice Management Consultant eMoney Advisor

During an era of evolving consumer preferences, the banking sector is undergoing a profound shift. As customers continue to broaden their perspectives, banking professionals must support their customers' financial wellness by providing holistic financial advice that aligns with individual goals and circumstances. Without adapting, financial institutions will find that loyalty may crumble amid uncertainty.

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Podcast links: generational differences

Abnormal Returns

Audio YouTube will soon allow automatic dubbing. (engadget.com) How many streams it takes an artist to earn $1,000 on different platforms. (genuineimpact.substack.com) Companies Matt Reustle talks with Tom Walsh, a portfolio manager at Baillie Gifford, about ASML Holdings ($ASML). (joincolossus.com) Benjamin Gilbert and David Rosenthal talk about the history of Porsche AG with Doug DeMuro.

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Housing June 12th Weekly Update: Inventory Increased 1.5% Week-over-week

Calculated Risk

Altos reports that active single-family inventory was up 1.5% week-over-week. Click on graph for larger image. This inventory graph is courtesy of Altos Research. As of June 9th, inventory was at 443 thousand (7-day average), compared to 436 thousand the prior week. Year-to-date, inventory is down 9.7%. And inventory is up 9.3% from the seasonal bottom eight weeks ago.

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What Happened to the Recession?

A Wealth of Common Sense

Here’s a headline from a Bloomberg story about the economy: And the lede: The recession calls are getting louder on Wall Street, but for many of the households and businesses who make up the world economy the downturn is already here. This story probably could have been written yesterday but it was actually published a year ago, in July 2022. If it seems like we’ve been reading about a looming recession for m.

Economy 142
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What Do You Believe? Why?

The Big Picture

One of the most important aspects of becoming a good investor is creating a model of the world around you. To do this, you must have good decision-making skills, and the ability to make sense of incomplete and sometimes contradictory information. This is not easy. Indeed, it is often counterintuitive. What seems like an obvious market-moving data point or piece of news is very often already in the price.

Investing 317
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Navigating Financial Storms: Strategies for Building Resilient Balance Sheets

Speaker: Carolina Aponte - Owner and CEO, Caja Holdings LLC

In today's rapidly changing business environment, building a resilient balance sheet is crucial to the survival of any business. A resilient balance sheet allows a company to withstand financial shocks and adapt to changing market conditions. To achieve this, companies need to focus on key strategies such as maintaining adequate liquidity, managing debt levels, diversifying revenue streams, and prioritizing profitability over growth.

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11 Must Reads for Real Estate Investors for the Weekend (June 9, 2023)

Wealth Management

Treasury Secretary Yellen expressed her concerns about the effect that commercial real estate loans might have on banks. Forbes listed 71 real estate firms among the 2,000 largest public companies in the world. These are among the must reads from around the real estate investment world heading into the weekend.

Banking 126
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Inflation Since 1872: A Long-Term Look at the CPI

Advisor Perspectives

The Consumer Price Index for Urban Consumers (CPI-U) released for May puts the year-over-year inflation rate at 405%. It is well above the 3.75% average since the end of the Second World War and above its 10-year moving average, now at 2.64%.

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Longform links: the most informed experts

Abnormal Returns

Technology AI is making for a spate of new junk websites powered by programmatic ads. (technologyreview.com) The FTC thinks Amazon ($AMZN) customers are stupid. (stratechery.com) The many ways in which data brokers label you. (themarkup.org) The Internet is a beast that needs to be fed with content. (om.co) Water Can Utah's Great Salt Lake be saved?

Economics 246