Executive Insights

The holidays are over. Christmas trees have been tossed to the curb, and we’re finally back to work. It’s 2019, the 19th year of the 21st century and the last year of the 2010s. We are customarily knee-deep in resolutions to lose weight, quit smoking, and get more sleep—but also up to our eyeballs in the fallout from 2018.    It was a...

Whether it was a faulty GPS or a few queasy reindeer, Santa Claus didn’t make it to Wall Street last year. The financial markets experienced the worst December since the Great Depression. The Dow Jones closed down more than 9%, while the S&P 500 fell almost 10%. Back in December 1931, the Dow sank a record 17%, and the S&P 500...

To look or not to look, that is the question—particularly if you’re holding stocks in your financial portfolio. Checking in on your retirement account nowadays is no fun, and to say that Wall Street has been uneasy of late is an understatement. The markets have been volatile not only week to week and day to day, but literally minute to...

Back in 2007, former options trader and New York Times best-selling author Nassim Taleb released a book called The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. In it, Taleb addresses the indiscriminate and often destructive power of unforeseen global events: “It is easy to see that life is the cumulative effect of a handful of...

In order to fully grasp the seismic shift currently underway in the international monetary system, we must first understand the sheer dominance of the U.S. dollar. We live in a dollar-centric moment. The U.S. dollar is currently the world’s prevailing reserve currency. More than half of world trade occurs in dollars, and more than 62...

Back in 1858, as a candidate for the U.S. Senate, Abraham Lincoln made a famous speech to his Republican colleagues in the Illinois Hall of Representatives. The speech, entitled “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” was considered radical at the time. It was a lecture about “putting an end to slavery agitation,” and while it...

As one of the most volatile Octobers in the history of Wall Street moves into the rearview mirror, we’re left with the uneasy task of assessing the damage to our retirement holdings. Whether you’re vested in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, real estate, or even cash, you likely took some hits last month. October was an undisputed bloodbath...

A bear market is generally considered to be a period in which stock prices fall by 20 percent or more and features a self-sustaining sell-off. It’s often accompanied by widespread pessimism and losses across all of the broad market indexes—like the Dow, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq. But that’s not exactly what we’re experiencing at...

When it comes to downturns in the economy, is hindsight only 20/20—or can you protect your assets by adjusting your allocations based upon the economic cycle? Wait—there’s an economic cycle? There is, indeed, and the leading authority on the patterns, fluctuations, and duration of the cycle is the National Bureau of Economic Research...