Behavioral Finance

My company has meetings about absolutely everything.

When it comes to the clients they serve, advisors need to think about the now and the new, not the next, and step up their offerings in key areas.

What is the best way to help laid-off employees find a new position?

I want to know how well I am doing and what I need to modify.

Few of us would sacrifice happiness at the altar of wealth. Financial advisors who add immeasurable value to their clients are focused on both.

The greatest anomaly is that despite decades of poor performance and the failure to effectively hedge exposure to conventional security classes, assets under management among hedge funds have grown from about $300 billion 25 years ago to about $5 trillion today.

How many times have your clients or employees stalled and failed to take action? And then their stall had you managing the fallout?

Are persistent outperformance and long-term alpha closely linked or is it possible to deliver alpha without being persistent?

Older advisors need to step aside and make room for the up and comers.

No advisor would dream of engaging in the kind of behavior that occurred at Purdue University in early December.

Advisors can illustrate the risks in single-stock positions by educating their clients on the historical evidence that demonstrates diversification is the prudent strategy.

Enforcing big, complex change within an organization is an ongoing struggle, and the rate of success is alarmingly low. What is the challenge?

Market watchers on Wall Street attribute this week’s stock selloff to the insidious threat of recession.

I have been in this profession for 25 years and I’ve never seen anything like the young people we are hiring today – lazy, unmotivated, but still thinking they deserve the trophy.

One syndrome is surprisingly common among the children of high-net worth parents: “failure to launch.”

Markets provided investors with a dozen lessons in 2022 (and a bonus one in the postscript).

My firm’s leader had a major unexpected undiagnosed medical issue. He walked out of the office one day and I haven’t seen him for four weeks.

In preparation for the new year, let’s look at the importance of celebrating what’s been done and learning from mistakes made.

I’ve not written much on New Year’s resolutions because “white knuckling” any meaningful behavioral change is rarely successful.

Contrary to what financial theory predicts, new research from Europe shows that the elderly accumulate assets later in life than expected, likely because they want to leave bequests, are receiving pensions, or are reluctant to part with assets such as their homes.

During our holiday party, one of my longest tenured advisors came up to me to say how appalling he thought it was that we held such “an expensive party.”

Allan Roth’s recent article, The 4% Rule Just Became a Whole Lot Easier, promises too much, makes inaccurate comparisons and blurs the notion of risk.

From the earliest days of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in the 1950s, practitioners have spoken of using it for investment fund management.

The client had been with us for more than 15 years. When she left, I called her to ask if there was anything we could have done differently or better.

The pay negotiation season is looking increasingly fraught this year as workers fret about 8% inflation — and their job security.

We have someone we have been carrying for quite some time and we need to ask him to leave.

Mohamed El-Erian sees the rollercoaster ride in financial markets, with Friday’s surprisingly strong US jobs report producing the latest drop, as another lesson for Chairman Jerome Powell and his Federal Reserve colleagues.

As we enter the end of the year to celebrate other holidays, consider improving your emotional intelligence (EQ) and connecting with your clients in deeper and more fulfilling ways.

This article explores the efficacy of PLIBs against a retirement income strategy that does not include an annuity, as well as strategies which allocate to either a SPIA, a DIA, or a GLWB. I used a utility framework for this analysis.

With all the market ups and downs, we are not as profitable as we have been historically.

Why do team members often resist change?

What is new about my thinking on money scripts is that, unless they are generational, they are not written for us by someone else.

How come the focus is always on the leader and never on the team members getting on board and playing their part?

I will share some insights for leaders in large and small firms to make change happen, manage results and continue to grow your businesses.

We are debating whether to expand our niche or whether to expand at all.

Dietrich spent the previous 15+ years in senior business development roles with Morningstar and brings extensive experience in indexing and direct indexing across the asset management and wealth spaces

Your inability to recognize the biases you have prevents you from managing a more successful practice.

I find it hard to like someone when I don’t know the context of what I would do to interact with them.

Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler won Nobel prizes for their work in behavioral science, propelling that discipline to the forefront of the advisory profession. But new research shows that behavioral science produces results that are no better than a simple model, and mutual funds based on it are no better than an index fund.

I was recently approached by a recruiter about a president position at another advisory firm.

I’ll share some insights as you encourage your team to be more open-minded and innovative and to help with facilitating change efforts within your organization.

Our leadership is forcing changes on us at a rapid pace that don’t make sense.

While everybody's been sweating over the housing and labor markets, the office market has been streaking toward a hard landing.

Frequent flyers are accustomed to turbulence on some flights. Indeed, many expect it. Despite such anticipation, however, the turbulence can once in a while create significant anxiety among even the most seasoned travelers.

The leading tail-risk potential is the increased odds that high inflation remains stubborn, and the Fed continues to fight those odds aggressively.

How can we design and deliver our advice in a way that clients implement it? Enter the commitment device.

I need someone to tell me if it’s time to get off this treadmill or if things will change and I can go back to being exhausted only on Thursdays and Fridays instead of every day of the week.

Direct indexing is the fastest growing segment of the asset management industry. In this interview, Brandon Thomas of Envestnet explains how direct indexing helps clients gain low-cost, tax-efficient exposure to asset classes, ESG and quantitative strategies.

There are serious, well-documented mental health issues suffered by financial advisors that have been exacerbated by the pandemic.

Several of our team members have had some very difficult life experiences over the last year.

Investor risk tolerance drives portfolio decisions, yet many financial advisors are rightly concerned about the accuracy of risk tolerance assessments. Why is it so hard? How can we get it right?

We are frustrated by the lack of new clients this year.

The classical notion of 1940 investment advice has been hijacked and replaced by the SEC with a weak, distant cousin.

I will share some ideas for how create a special event to honor a client.

We have a team of advisors who are the kings and queens of gossip.

A close look at the historical data suggests that the excess performance of stocks relative to bonds occurred mainly in two historical periods and has been inconsistent over the last 25 years.