According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute’s (EBRI) 2012 annual Retirement Confidence Survey, only 14% of Americans are very confident that they will have enough money to live comfortably in retirement. If you find yourself lacking confidence about whether or not you have saved enough for retirement, consider pushing back your intended retirement date. You’ve probably have a target retirement date in your head, but the benefits of continuing to work may be enough to help you get on track.
The Process of the Tender Offer
The stock market is a place where buyers and sellers congregate to trade. Usually, when you sell shares, you can just click sell and the broker will match a buyer on the other side and vice versa when you buy shares. However, there may be a special occasion where a buyer will contact you directly with a proposal in the mail, stating that you can sell your shares through a tender offer.
Emotional Risk?
You will often hear that investors are worried about the risks associated with investments. They are concerned about inflation risk, market risk, and liquidity risk. There is one type of risk that should be a major concern for you, but it is often ignored. Are you concerned about emotional risk? The risk that you make investment decisions based on fear, greed, or worse, doing what everyone else is doing.
Restoring Trust in the Investment Industry
The CFA Institute recently published “The Integrity List: 50 Ways to Restore Trust in the Investment Industry.” Wall Street has received a lot of bad press in the recent years. Whether it was the creation of destructive financial instruments, large bailouts, or a ‘failed’ Facebook IPO, Main Street has many reasons to feel upset. The root of many of these problems is the lack of understanding and education from the retail investor. Clearly, there was a fair share of people and companies who acted inappropriately, but too many other organizations and industry participants were categorized along with a small minority.
Questions Everyone Should Ask Before Retirement
With all the turmoil in the markets over the past several years many investors have been left questioning themselves whether they will have enough to retire the way they’ve always dreamed, or retire at all, for that matter. Whether your retirement years are right around the corner or many years off in the distance, there’s never a wrong time to evaluate your definition of retirement and what it means to you both ideologically and financially.
Transmogrification in the Snider Investment Method
Occasionally in the Snider Investment Method, we will issue a position alert notifying our clients to Transmogrify a position into a new one. This is usually due to a change in the company structure like a buyout or merger or an event that impacts the stock or options, such as options no longer being offered for a position. Without going into too much detail of the Transmogrification process, Transmogrification essentially swaps an old position for a new position.
MoneyShow.com Interview
I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by MoneyShow.com’s Kate Stalter. Kate does many interviews with market experts as well as financial advisors around the country. We briefly discussed the Snider Investment Method, Snider Advisors, and our new SIM ETF Portfolio. You can listen to the interview or read the transcript here. (Capture Gains with ETFs and Covered Calls)
Transmogrification in the Snider Investment Method: What it does and when to use it
Occasionally in the Snider Investment Method, we will issue a position alert notifying our clients to Transmogrify a position into a new one. This is usually due to a change in the company structure like a buyout or merger or an event that impacts the stock or options, such as options no longer being offered for a position. Without going into too much detail of the Transmogrification process, Transmogrification essentially swaps an old position for a new position.
Emotions: The Enemy of Logic
When investing in the stock market, most people will say that the goal is to “buy low and sell high.” In a perfect world, everyone would stay true to this and the stock market would only go up. However, this is not always the case. Equal probability states that stocks have a 50-50% chance of increasing or decreasing in value. As a result, the stock market will often not move in a desirable direction, decreasing the value of the portfolio. Investors may ditch the “buy low and sell high” mantra, panicking because of the loss in value and dump the stock. Their emotions caused them to do the exact opposite, “buy high and sell low.”
A Visual Guide to ETFs
After announcing the managed SIM-ETF portfolio we fielded a lot of phone calls from interested clients asking us to further explain exactly what ETF’s are. With over 1,400 exchange traded products on the market, it is not surprising that we regularly get this question, and as we have written before, not all ETFs are created equal.
