Articles from the Strategy Category
Tariff-Related Trauma and Your Portfolio
April 16, 2025 | By Kevin Smith, CFA
When the headlines scream tariffs, investors flinch—and markets tend to lurch. That’s exactly what happened recently as new tariff announcements triggered a sharp decline in the U.S. stock market. But what’s really going on? Let’s unpack it. Who Actually Pays…Read More
An Alternative Stock Market Story
April 4, 2025 | By Kevin Smith, CFA
Imagine you’re baking a cake, but instead of carefully measuring the ingredients, you you overdo it on sugar to appeal to your inner child. The cake might taste okay at first, but it’s not balanced—and eventually, it could collapse or…Read More
Matt on Markets: Palpable Concerns
March 31, 2025 | By Matt Pierce, CFA
It is generally an exercise in futility to ascribe a single issue to a decline in market prices, particularly on a day-to-day basis. The raft of policy measures being proposed and the speed with which they’re being implemented by the…Read More
Market Forecasts, Mega Stocks, and the Year Ahead
January 25, 2025 | By Kevin Smith, CFA
The image below reflects what I imagine the world’s greatest stock market forecaster envisions when she closes her eyes. All of the millions of variables perfectly connected into a beautiful coherent understanding of how it all works: Imagine a formula…Read More
Bitcoin!
December 20, 2024 | By Kevin Smith, CFA
A lot has changed with Bitcoin since our 2021 blog post, so it’s time for an update. Bitcoin has achieved staying power. With a total market value of about $2 trillion, it probably isn’t going away unless its cryptography is broken…Read More
Dealing With The Dips
September 1, 2024 | By Kevin Smith, CFA
Employees get paid for doing work. Investors get paid for taking risk. Risk is the chance of losing value between the time of purchase and sale. We experience risk when the value of an asset falls while we own it….Read More
Using Dollar-Cost Averaging to Reduce Risk
May 15, 2024 | By Kevin Smith, CFA
Investing a large sum of money can be daunting, especially with the uncertainty of market fluctuations. Enter dollar-cost averaging (DCA), a strategy designed to help investors manage risk by spreading their investments over time. By consistently investing a fixed amount,…Read More
The Language of Loss
August 4, 2022 | By Kevin Smith, CFA
If you bet against the Golden State Warriors basketball team, and you watched their star, Steph Curry, make a game winning shot, it may have felt like you were losing money from the time the ball left his hand until…Read More
Vested RSUs in a Market Decline
August 4, 2022 | By Manisha Gupta, CFP®, MBA
Do you have restricted stock units (RSUs) that have recently vested? If you work in the tech or financial sectors in 2022, that probably means that you have seen a decline in their value (energy sector folks have this in…Read More
Markets and War
March 15, 2022 | By Kevin Smith, CFA
I’ve heard financial markets described as “expectations machines”, and I think that’s about right. Asset prices are based on what people are willing to pay for them, which is based on what they expect to receive in return. Prices go…Read More