One of the opportunities we highlighted early in the year in our 2025 Outlook was a big tax bill that boosted corporate profits, similar to 2017. We never believed it would be as large as the 2017 tax bill’s boost on profits—after all, you can only cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% …
As a CPA, one of the questions that I have been getting more frequently is, “What is a donor-advised fund?” This is not surprising as the number of individual donor-advised fund accounts has grown by over 50% for the second year in a row, according to the National Philanthropic Trust’s 2019 …
The S&P 500 declined for the fourth straight week. On Wednesday, the index of large U.S. companies had declined just more than 9.5% but rallied late in the week. The S&P 500 is 7.8% below its Sept. 2 high. The four-week decline has matched the characteristics of a price adjustment a …
Retail sales figures continued a string of economic data pointing toward slowing growth accompanied by a gradual reopening of state economies. Consumers seem willing to take some risks. Retail and food service sales rose 0.6% last month. (See Chart 1.) Increased sales at restaurants contrib …
There are many misconceptions about financial advisors. For starters, advisors are often thought of as a salesperson, trying to sell you a product that makes them a commission. Or that advisors are unnecessary in a world of robo-advisors and online trading. In reality, there are a lot of im …
Stocks continued to retreat as losses on Tuesday were large enough to push the market down more than 2% for the second week in a row. The S&P 500 has retraced 6.7% of its massive rally from the lows in March.
Investors were reminded stock investing comes with volatility as the S&P 500 dropped 3.5% on Thursday and declined 2.3% for the week. The downside pressure was felt most directly by stocks that had performed best. Figure 1 shows the best performing stocks this year (furthest to the righ …
