Nathan Gilbert
Your Investment Time Horizon is Longer Than You Think
Recently, my wife’s grandmother (my grandmother-in-law?), affectionately known as Ging, celebrated her 94th birthday. While she has had some medical complications along her journey, her quality of life has mostly been very good if not excellent. She is certainly lucky to have a l
Nathan GilbertNov 26, 2019
Smart vs. Dumb
News flash: Predicting when markets go up or down can be almost impossible. Some people can get it right some of the time, but no one can get it right all the time. We’ve shown plenty of evidence of this in many of our blog posts, but I reacquainted myself with an interesting cha
Nathan GilbertNov 12, 2019Children & Money
As a parent and investment manager/planner, I want to teach my children good money habits. It can be relatively straightforward to teach them what to do, but actually setting up accounts for children, it can be difficult and confusing. Probably the most talked about account type
Nathan GilbertOct 29, 2019
Fund Flows & Huge Cucumbers
Recently, there have been record outflows from equity funds and record inflows into bond funds. This is likely due to the negative sentiment around the current market environment. As we continue to enjoy the longest bull market in history, many investors feel that it can’t last a
Nathan GilbertOct 15, 2019Report Cards
With over a month of school behind us, grades are starting to come in for Yakel kids—for the most part, it’s all good news. Everyone’s doing ok for first quarter—except Melanie…she’s working on pulling up her C in PE!! Apparently, the new PE teacher at school is a little more str
Nathan GilbertOct 8, 2019
Risk vs. Return (or Cute vs. Stinky)
As investment managers, we are constantly trying to walk the line between risk and return. And, more importantly, we are trying to find the right mix for our clients’ particular situation. Typically, the more risk you take, the more return you can expect over time. It’s a fairly
Nathan GilbertOct 1, 2019
An Unexpected Storm
This past Labor Day, my family and I experienced a very strong “micro-burst” (my wife claims tornado!) at our house. While it was far from a disaster, it did do quite bit of damage to many of our trees, small portions of our house, and it completely wiped out an old shed/spring h
Nathan GilbertSep 17, 2019
Comparing Apples to Oranges
Lately, some of our clients have been asking us why their account is not performing as well as the S&P 500 so far this year. It’s certainly a valid question, but it misses the point of what it means to stay diversified. Certainly, investing SOME of your money in a low-cost index
Nathan GilbertSep 3, 2019Back to the Routine
Unlike Nathan’s children that had to start school this week, our kids don’t go back until after Labor Day. –The Gilbert kids not at the beach So, to squeeze the last bit of summer fun in, we are spending some of our last few days of freedom at the beach. –The Yakel kids at the […
Nathan GilbertAug 27, 2019
What’s Up (or down) with the Yield Curve?
If you follow the financial headlines even a little bit, it would be hard to miss all of the recent attention focused on the yield curve. Why? Mainly because an inversion in parts of the yield curve have been predictors of the last 5 recessions. What is the yield curve anyway? Th
Nathan GilbertAug 20, 2019DOUBLE OUCH!
Yesterday gave us another unfriendly reminder that stocks can be volatile. Investors continue to focus on the US-China trade war, which escalated even further on Monday. As a result, the S&P 500 lost about 3% of its value. That’s the largest one-day point drop since December of l
Nathan GilbertAug 6, 2019More Daisy (and maybe more stocks?)
As you are probably already aware, stocks have had a strong rally since a very difficult end to 2018. Not surprisingly, this spooked a lot of retail investors (the average investor) and equity (stocks) fund outflows have been sharply negative since the beginning of the year. And,
Nathan GilbertJul 23, 2019