Speeding Tickets & Investing

Recently, I received a gift from the Iowa State Patrol in the form of a speeding ticket. In reflecting on this experience, it occurred to me that I took an unnecessary risk to attain something I didn’t need and ended up sacrificing money I didn’t have to lose.

November 8, 2021 Financial Perspectives

You know the old saying, “What goes up must come down.” How is it that currently everything seems to be going up at the same time? Signs of inflation like oil prices, labor prices, trade deficits. And yet markets are going up with stocks at all-time highs. Bond prices are rising this week when often, bond prices move inversely to stock prices. Government spending is certainly going up, consumer spending is going up and tax rates seem to be poised to rise as well. What do all these upwards mean for investors?

Barbell Portfolios Can Be Hard To Hold On To

Barbells work great at the gym because they put weight on a bar in such a way that it’s balanced, leaving room in the middle for someone to use it to workout. We often see portfolios that are designed like a barbell at the gym: lots of risk in one account and lots of cash or very short-term securities in another. In aggregate, it might produce some balance, but the reality is that it can create some real challenges.

Equilibrium Markets in the Time of COVID

Over the years, Foster Group has utilized a number of mutual funds and exchange traded funds managed by Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA). DFA was founded in 1981 on the idea of making academic investment research and empirically based portfolio management accessible to investors. In this article, Professor Kenneth French describes how markets responded to the events surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.

August 24, 2021 Financial Perspectives

Is it possible to be too smart? Can a problem or set of circumstances be overanalyzed? Is there such a thing as too much information? There’s some evidence out there that this is indeed possible! Kent Kramer shares our perspective on what’s been happening in and around financial markets recently and what we think successful investors should be thinking about – without overthinking it!

What’s Your Best Buy: Firm Foundation or Castle In the Air?

If an investor could discover the true worth of a company, a piece of real estate or even an idea, where “true worth” equated to the future value or price that others would pay, success would be almost certain to follow. Those opportunities that were priced significantly lower than the future value would be automatic buys. The one’s with higher prices today than the future price would be ones to avoid. If only it were that simple!