
When building wealth for the long term, your goal should be long term investing ‒ time in the market versus timing the market. This view represents the difference between being a long-term owner and a short-term renter (of stocks). If you can only take one investing axiom to heart, long term investing might be the

Quantifying a financial advisor’s value has become easier in recent years as financial services firms have undertaken and completed studies on the matter. Firms such as Vanguard, Morningstar, Dalbar and most recently Russell Investments, have added to the body of knowledge on this topic. The significant global changes of the past 24 months have prompted

Much has been written about investment behavioral mistakes and whether financial advisors can help clients generate market-beating investment outperformance. Amid all of the activity that investors and their advisors pursue in hopeful expectations of outperforming the market, it’s easy to overlook the risk that those activities might create below-market returns. Underperformance can easily come from
Shortfall Risk is the Greatest Risk to Retirement Success The greatest risk to retirement success? For most of us, it’s shortfall risk ‒ the chance that our savings will expire before we do. Shortfall risk typically arises from one or both of these shortcomings: (1) not taking the time and doing the work to study

Learning Lessons from the Market Correction Helps Us Become More Disciplined Investors The stock market’s plunge at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the S&P 500 index plunged 32% in five weeks, shook up a lot of investors and reminded all of us to refresh our memories of previous “lessons from the market correction.”

Retirement Distribution Planning May Help Minimize Your Overall Tax Expenses You’ll likely need to develop a retirement distribution planning strategy to help you minimize your overall tax expenses and help fund a more comfortable retirement, even after you’ve saved diligently and invested wisely throughout your working years. Without a retirement distribution planning strategy, you may

In Volatile Markets, Keep Your Bearings and Stay on Plan “In volatile markets, keep your bearings and stay on plan.” That’s always our guidance to clients when markets become unsettled, either to the upside or the downside. As of today, the S&P 500 has lost 17.7% in the five and one-half months since the beginning

Investing lessons from the pension world help us to focus on the critical importance of matching our long-term retirement liabilities with proper long-term investment assets. Investing Lessons from the Pension World Help Us Generate Better Retirement Expense Estimates Asset/liability matching originated in the pension world. Pension managers are responsible for meeting specific objectives, namely, paying

You May Not Believe It Until You Read It, But It’s True. The shocking truth about index investing is that reality can be very different from theory. Index investing funds are wildly popular with Americans: As of year-end 2021, “passive” equity and fixed income index funds managed total net assets of $5.7 trillion, according to

With the days of company pensions faded into memory, it’s up to most of us to build and manage our own pension plans ‒ and manage the multi-million dollar retirement planning question ourselves. How much do we need? And what are the possibilities that we suffer shortfall risk – the possibility that our savings will
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