Writing a book can bolster your credibility as a financial advisor, but it does something else that’s equally as valuable: It tells people who you are before you ever meet them.
Whatever you end up doing, make sure you are authentic and honest in your approach. Clients see right through a request or ask that you are uncomfortable making. You have to know what you want, find words that are right for you, and proceed accordingly.
For centuries the so-called cannon shot rule determined who controlled the seas. The legal concept, codified by Dutch jurist Cornelius van Bynkershoek in 1702, was simple: The distance a cannonball reached from shore set the maritime boundary of a coastal state.
Many advisors assume they have a referral problem. They look at their growth, consider how infrequently new clients arrive through introductions, and conclude that clients simply are not inclined to refer as often as they might.
Global bonds surged Wednesday on news that the US and Iran had agreed to a ceasefire, pausing a war that roiled markets for weeks by delivering the worst oil shock in years.
US stocks rallied after President Donald Trump’s announcement of a two-week ceasefire in the Iran war spurred relief across markets.
European stocks soared the most in a year as investors rushed to buy stocks in the wake of the US and Iran agreeing to a two-week ceasefire in exchange for Tehran reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
Fresh data on the US labor market and new research from the Federal Reserve suggest that the conventional wisdom around employment growth being sluggish is wrong.
Financial therapy can help men explore their internal parts to learn to recognize and begin to heal the emotional beliefs driving their economic behavior. The point of financial therapy is not to dampen ambition, but to heal beliefs that may be souring it.
In the competitive and client-centric world of wealth management advisory services, a strong business development strategy is more than a growth tool; it’s a necessity. While digital marketing, webinars and in-house events have their place, two of the most effective and scalable channels for high-quality lead generation remain referrals and centers of influence (COIs).
Cybersecurity stocks have sold off this year alongside the rest of the software sector, but with artificial intelligence increasing the potential threats from bad actors, investors risk missing out on the burgeoning demand for their services.
Finance has been moving fast. From crypto to prediction betting to exchange-traded funds to private credit, new markets—and risks—are proliferating.
Wall Street’s biggest ETF issuers are circling Invesco Ltd.’s Nasdaq 100 franchise, threatening to end its near-exclusive hold on the index.
The defining statistic of the so-called K-shaped economy is a little hard to define.
Call it the season of IPO prep. Recent launches and announcements from OpenAI and arch rival Anthropic are aimed at laying the groundwork to go public in late 2026 or early 2027, and for OpenAI, which just closed a $122 billion funding round that values it at $852 billion.
When investors want to reduce risk, one commonly used tool is beta. For instance, an investor may sell higher-beta stocks and replace them with lower-beta ones to cushion against an expected market decline. Such a strategy is intuitive and widely used; however, it can be greatly flawed.
Breakeven real rates can inform us how much of a total return portfolio’s realized risk premium would be required merely to catch up to the benefits of delayed claiming, arguably an inefficient use of the equity risk premium.
The debate over ETFs versus mutual funds has never been particularly useful for advisors who actually build portfolios. In practice, the question was never which vehicle is better — it was always which vehicle is better for this objective, in this sleeve, for this client. In 2026, that discipline matters more than ever.
Cities such as New York and Chicago are in deep financial trouble. Broadly speaking, they have two options: Make the difficult but appropriate choice to raise taxes and reduce the scale of government, or continue to live in a state of denial, increasing their pension obligations while also promising their residents more services.
BlackRock Inc. is setting its sights on a corner of the $13.7 trillion US exchange-traded fund industry long controlled by Invesco Ltd: tracking the Nasdaq 100 Index.
The next 12 months are expected to bring a bumper crop of mega initial public offerings to market. Billionaire Elon Musk’s rocket, satellite and AI company SpaceX has reportedly filed for a potentially record-breaking offering.
US equities and crude oil prices edged higher as investors focus on signs of a potential diplomatic push toward a ceasefire in the Iran war.
Bond traders kicked off the week betting that the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates on hold for the coming year, with the Treasuries market holding steady ahead of President Donald Trump’s extended deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Exchange-traded fund issuers are shutting new products at the fastest pace in years as competition for investor money intensifies.
SpaceX has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter, bringing billionaire Elon Musk’s rocket, satellite and AI company closer to delivering the biggest-ever listing.
The stock market is looking past the sharp interest rate hikes priced by Europe’s bond market, risking losses for investors backing the wrong outcome.
Big names in crypto, payments and cloud infrastructure are racing to build the financial plumbing for a world in which AI agents — not humans — handle transactions on the internet.
Less than two months ago, projections showed the US government on track to borrow some $2 trillion this year with budget deficits exceeding 5% of gross domestic product indefinitely. Since then, this dire outlook has worsened — thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling on tariffs, the war with Iran, the prospect of slowing economic growth and rising interest rates.
Unilever Plc’s Fernando Fernandez haslucked out by selling the company’s food businesses, including Hellmann’s mayonnaise and Knorr stock cubes, to McCormick & Co. But Fernandez, who’s been chief executive officer for just over a year, shouldn’t squander his good fortune; he needs a clear vision for what comes next.
When Edward Jenner inoculated an eight-year-old boy with cowpox in 1796, the principle was radical: Expose a healthy body to a mild, manageable version of harm, and it builds the defenses to survive something far worse. The cowpox patient never got smallpox. Markets work in much the same way.
This week’s column is dedicated to improving two of the most critical skills: asking strong open-ended questions and listening in an active and reflective way. Let’s start with the harder part — listening.
How should RIAs think about advisor cash compensation? This article focuses on the salary, bonus, and benefits arrangements commonly used in the industry and typically documented in investment advisor representative (IAR) agreements.
Now that Nelson Peltz has won a surprise bidding war for Janus Henderson Group Plc, the activist investor can start to revamp the $493 billion asset manager he has circled for years.
Eli Lilly & Co.’s Zepbound is helping to solve one of the most intractable health challenges of our time: Obesity. Now, the drugmaker hopes to crack another significant public health problem: Sleep disorders.
OpenAI has completed a deal to raise $122 billion from investors at an $852 billion valuation, marking the company’s largest funding round to date by far and bolstering its costly push for more chips, data centers and talent.
Hedge fund activist Boaz Weinstein is on the cusp of his most significant campaign victory yet — overhauling an investment trust whose claim to fame is an early bet on Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket company. But the beleaguered target is doing a good job of trashing the prize pot.
The Iran war is challenging Japan’s safe-haven assets, once again forcing domestic investors to seek better returns abroad.
I suggest looking both inward and outward to answer two central questions: “Can we afford to help without harming our own financial future?” and “Will this increase or decrease the child’s movement toward financial independence?”
Clients do not want to be convinced. They want to decide. When a conversation supports that sense of ownership, commitment follows with far less effort, because the decision feels like an expression of who they are, not a response to someone else’s reasoning.
Retirement savers have plenty of questions about a recent executive order that opens a path for alternative investments, such as private equity, real estate and digital assets, in 401(k) plans. One advisor shares why individuals have good reason to take pause.
Warren Buffett cautioned that he’s seeing signs of fragility emerging in the banking system as it has become more connected to non-bank players.
On paper, Super Micro Computer Inc. is the type of company that Wall Street can’t get enough of, with soaring sales, an enviable list of partners like Nvidia Corp. and its placement at the center of the artificial intelligence boom.
Tech megacaps entered a correction, oil prices broke out, big-money funds retreated and small-lot investors showed waning conviction in buying the dip. While the war in Iran that triggered all that didn’t end a three-year bull run in US equities, it is shaking it to its core.
BlackRock Inc. plans to launch a fund next month focused on large Southeast Asian stocks, according to people familiar with the matter, a move supporting Singapore’s drive to boost liquidity in the local market.
A Japanese oil tanker slips through the Strait of Hormuz in the dead of night, radio silenced to conceal its position. Iran secures a market for its crude in defiance of Western sanctions. The balance of the world’s energy trade switches from incumbent hegemons toward emerging powers.
Does artificial intelligence herald soaring prosperity or mass unemployment, political breakdown and Orwellian subjection? Nobody, not even AI, can honestly say. Forced to guess, I’d predict some of both.
When someone says a retiree is “living off Social Security,” it’s not usually $100,000 a year.
The egregious irony here is, according to Luke Kemp’s Goliath’s Curse, that powerful billionaires like Thiel, Altman, and Hoffman may well have a hand in, or at least be tangentially associated with, ushering in said apocalypse. The primary driver of societal collapse, Kemp believes, is tech-powered inequality, for which Thiel, Altman, and Hoffman are the poster children.
To better understand how AI might affect the labor market and, ultimately, the economy, we’ve summarized Citrini’s bleak outlook alongside rebuttals from Citadel Securities and Bianco Research. These summaries provide a useful primer on how labor markets may adjust to the upcoming major technological changes.
For investors, understanding the full anatomy of fixed income is critical, not only to capture attractive risk-adjusted returns in today’s environment but also to appreciate its indispensable role in powering economic growth and financial stability.
