Over the weekend and early on Monday, we received a flurry of messages from our clients – “What’s happening? Should we do something?” Briefly: While we certainly recognize and understand the concerns about what’s going on, we think it wise to exercise caution with respect to our clients’ portfolios right now.
While there is abundant cause for concern in the current political and social situation, our approach has always been to look beyond the current circumstances, and to construct prudent portfolios that can survive most short-term stresses. Briefly, we believe that Trump’s cruel chaos does not create a need to make big changes to your investments at this time.
This debt ceiling nonsense appears to be a manufactured crisis, which could and probably will be resolved pretty easily, and the best approach for all of us is to remain invested in our long-term portfolios.
March has been a wild and wooly month so far, with high volatility continuing to roil the global stock markets and central banks continuing to put pressure on bond markets. But the most interesting story of the last couple of weeks — and the one that’s sparked the most conversation with clients — is sudden turmoil in the banking industry.
Whenever markets move far enough & fast enough to draw the attention of the non-financial press, investment advisors start to get a few more phone calls than usual. The US markets (stocks and bonds both, unusually enough) have been acting very strange lately — these “up 3%, down 4%” swings…
In this short series (see the Introduction), I lay out the four key categories of work that we do on behalf of our investment management clients — four kinds of activities that are difficult for folks without our training and experience to do for themselves. I hope that this series…
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