Category Archives: Wiser Blog
SPY or IVV; The S&P 500 Index Decision
After making a decision to invest in the ever popular S&P 500 index, investors have two options within the ETF universe for a pure S&P 500 play. The choices are IShares’ IVV and State Street’s SPDR SPY. According to MorningStar on 11/30/2008, SPY had over 70 Billion in assets compared to …
New iShares ETFs
The following is an article featured on Indexuniverse.com recent ally as part of my column, Efficient Investor.
IShares has just issued a dozen new unique ETFs which track the S&P Target Date Index Series and the Target Risk Index Series. Below is a breakdown of the two categories with the …
Fees Increase as Your Assets Decrease
An article in a local paper here in Atlanta, ‘Investors likely to face higher mutual fund fees” by Eileen Ambrose in which Ambrose details what Jeff Tjornehoj, a senior research analyst at Lipper, Inc, estimates that the average equity mutual will increase its expense ratio by .10%.…
Posted in Economic Commentary, Wiser Blog
Tagged investing, Money, Mutual Fund Fees, Retirment
Leave a comment
3 ETF Capital Gains
I regretfully anounce that 3 ETFs all issued by SSgA will be giving their investors capital gains this year.…
Posted in Economic Commentary, Estate & Tax Planning, Wiser Blog
Tagged BIL, Capital Gains, ETF capital gains, LAG, mismanagement by SSgA, SSgA, XPH
Leave a comment
Market Timing This Market
Market Timing has been and will continue to be a difficult strategy (especially when its not your original strategy) and many have found this particularly true this year, whether it was going to cash the day before a huge market rally or deciding the market had hit the bottom and …
Posted in Economic Commentary, Wiser Blog
Tagged BGU, Direxion, ETF Investing, ETFs, ETNs, Market Timing, Money
Leave a comment
BehaviorGap.com
I really want to plug Carl and his website BehaviorGap.com for the message they have to investors. Please visit the site and learn more about what the ‘Behavior Gap’ is. Here it is in a nut-shell (if you’re a client of ours you will note that it is very similar to …
While I Was Gone: Target Funds
While I was out of town last week with my wife, several very interesting issues came into the ETF world; Target Date Funds.…
Uncovering The Uncorrelated Asset Class
2008 will be the first full year there has been ETFs tracking emerging market bond indexes. This is a very unique asset class.…
UCLA Study Claims That FDR Extended the Great Depression for 7 Years
This is a major claim. Read here to decide for yourself.…
Posted in Economic Commentary, Wiser Blog
Tagged FDR, The Great Depression, UCLA, UCLA FDR Study
Leave a comment
You Can’t Keep The Market’s Down
In our weekly email update to clients it was nice to report a weekly double digit gain rather than what felt like triple digit losses in the past.…
The Most Defensive Small Cap ETF
The small cap asset class has performed well over the last decade and has done relatively well during this current bear market. …
Municipal Bond Funds
Casey Smith, President of Wiser Wealth Management, and I were quoted in a recent article about municipal bond funds. Here’s a quote,…
Posted in Wiser Blog
Tagged Index Universe, Indexing, investing, Money, MUB, Munis, Retirement Investing, wiser wealth management
Leave a comment
‘Everything works much better when wrong decisions are punished and good decisions make you rich.” -Anna Schwartz
Read this Wall Street Journal interview with Anna Schwartz, a 92 year-old economist who has some real, honest , and unbiased wisdom about the financial system. …
Posted in Economic Commentary, Wiser Blog
Tagged Advice, Analysis, Anna Schwartz, Banking system, financial crisis, Government Regulation, investing, Money
1 Comment
More Insight from Warren Buffett
These last few weeks have been very challenging to say the least. The economy of our Great Nation has been shaken and the Federal government has had to step in to bail out our financial markets for the first time since the Great Depression. …
Posted in Economic Commentary, Wiser Blog
Tagged Advice, Finance, financial crisis, great depression, Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, Wiser
1 Comment
A Good Explaination of the Market Sell Off
Pat Dorsey, Director of Equity research at Morningstar, Inc, gives a great overview of some of the things that are driving prices away from the fundamentals and gives some good data about past bear markets.
Video: What’s Behind the Relentless Selling…
Buffett Buying In
Warren Buffett, famous investor and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has been getting a lot of attention recently for his company’s large purchases in Financial Firms. He has also been very political during the election year. …
Stock Market Recoveries
One of my favorite pieces of stock market advice is by William Berstein,
Investing has and always been, and will remain, an operation in which wealth is transferred from those without a working knowledge of financial history to those who have one.
…
The Stock Market Fear Number
Since 1990, the CBOE has issued the volatility index, VIX. VIX is commonly called the ‘Fear Index’ because it tracks the amount of defensive options being bought at the CBOE. …
Is This Panic Sensible?
The title to this post should not make sense, ‘sensible panic’. That does not mean that panic can not be a self fullfilling panic, in which prices do not reflect true value and take years to recover (a secular bear market). Jason Zweig offers some good advice in his recent article…
Hedge Funds, Index Funds, and Buffet’s $1,000,000 Bet
Warren Buffet has bet with one million dollars going to charity that the S&P 500 will beat the top five hedge funds (picked by Protege, a hedge fund to fund) net of fees over a ten year period. …
Some Market Wisdom
This video with Mr. Jack Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group and former CEO, highlights some wisdom from a man with a lot of experience and who started Vanguard, a company that has a long history of being on the side of the individual investor.
Video: Bogle: Keep Investing – Morningstar …
Posted in Economic Commentary, Wiser Blog
Tagged Advice, Bogle, Indexing, investing, stock market wisdom
1 Comment
The Last 52 Weeks in Review
As we are nearly one year from the peak of the S&P 500 this October, I want to take a look at how Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) did compared to their mutual fund counterparts.…
Posted in ETFs & Indexing, Wiser Blog
Tagged ETFs v. Mutual Funds, Indexing, investing, Long term investing
Leave a comment
Mark-to-Market
Mark-to Market is an accounting rule where businesses must revalue or ‘mark’ a financial asset or liability to its current market price. …
Posted in Economic Commentary, Wiser Blog
Tagged bail-out, investing, level 3 assets definition, mark-to-market
1 Comment
Market Panic Sell Off
Today’s panic sell off was based purely on emotions, not financial evaluations. …
Secular Bear Market?
Russ Koesterich, Barlay’s Chief Investment Strategist, said in a video that they posted on their ishares website (view video below) that he believes we are going through a secular bear market. …
What Happens to an ETF tracking a Lehman Brothers Index
As you may know an ETF (Exchange Traded Fund) must track a registered index (you can read my post on ETFs and ETNs for more information). Many exchange traded funds follow a Lehman Brothers Index.…
Posted in ETFs & Indexing, Wiser Blog
Tagged Barclays, etf, ETF tracking a Lehman Brothers index, investing, lehman brother index
Leave a comment
This Week on Wall Street
So it has been a crazy week with a lot of selling, buying, and an emergency stop on short selling, affecting the way hedge funds trade.…
Capital-Gains Tax and The Election
Fact: Capital Gains lead to retirement and capital-gains taxes threaten your retirement income.…
What is Risk? Part 1
Risk of an investor’s portfolio can have several meanings. However, in highly diversified portfolios the only meaningful risk is the risk that an investor will have less money in their portfolios at the end of their planned time horizon.…
A Picture of a Loser’s Game
In the below video Jim Cramer gets upset about the mess of obvious insider trading that has occurred with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. …
ETFs v. ETNs: Part II, The ETN
ETNs (exchange traded notes) are only a couple years old but the idea has been around since the early 90s. They are “Structured Notes,” a debt vehicle, usually with time to maturity of over ten years, where the issuer promises to pay the return of a set investment determined by …
Some Wiser Advice
I wanted to highlight today some quotes from some very smart individuals that have weathered some tough market conditions and are now weathering or would be if alive the current market conditions. …
ETFs v. ETNs: Part 1: A focus on The ETF
Both ETFs (exchange traded funds) and ETNs (exchange traded notes have been making a lot of noise lately. Morningstar Inc. now tracks 89 ETNs with $7.3 billion in assets and 732 ETFs with $586 billion in assets. …
Why Currency Matters
As we know holding foreign assets, like foreign stock, benefits you when the US dollar back home is weak. In a recent observation made by the guys at IndexUniverse.com, they found that there is a huge difference between the returns made by foreign investor investing in their local markets and US investors …
Welcome to Wiser Wealth Management in Marietta, GA
Good Day,
This site is intended to feature the research and observations of Wiser Wealth Management, a Registered Investment Advisory Firm in Marietta, Georgia.
To preface all future postings, I would like to share and express our bias towards the investment strategy of indexing and building wealth through indexing. In the …
A Sense of Optimism in the Air
Jack Bogle, Founder of Vanguard and creator of the first S&P 500 index fund has lived through 10 bear markets. He talked to the Associated Press about his thoughts.…