You routinely engage in some practices that on the surface make sense. But you would gather more assets if you discarded them. Here are three examples.

Every advisor wants clients to be 100% satisfied, especially those top clients who drive profitability. It takes three things to ensure that your very best clients feel well served. Regrettably, most advisors do a mediocre job on the first two and an abysmal job on the third.

Many top strategists, including Rick Reider of BlackRock, favor stocks over bonds. We look at those analyses plus other news about income investing.

In one of the earlier articles in our series, we identified six distinct sources of competitive advantages. This is the fifth article in the series and focuses on mission critical products and services as the source of a sustainable competitive advantage.

Here’s a new bet with Warren Buffett based on a portfolio oriented around risk parity and factors.

What do living organisms, cities and businesses have in common? They all have organic characteristics: they’re born, grow, sometimes shrink and usually die. They all require energy to maintain and grow, and they all must deal with the sometimes undesirable byproducts of their existence.

The Wall Street Journal says that funds given a top “star” rating by Morningstar won’t be top performers. But the Journal’s findings are neither new nor as conclusive as its article states.

For nearly 25 years, the EU has held together despite challenges from bankrupt institutions, separatist movements and members with widely divergent economic prospects. But that cohesion is being tested, according to Albert Edwards, by countries that are losing their competitiveness. But his greater concern is the impact the Fed-induced credit bubble will have on the markets.

Once I learned how to avoid cornering prospects into a “right versus wrong” choice, it became easy to persuade them to use passive management. Indeed, the approach I learned can be applied to any situation when you confront a stubborn prospect.

Here are Bev’s five best tips for improving your relational skills with your clients.

Traditional seminars are bound for extinction because on-line technology gives advisors a better option to present to prospects.

I have previously explained why my firm is investing in pharmaceuticals stocks, despite the sector being a favorite punching bag of politicians. I noted that we have recently added to our existing positions in Amgen, Allergan, and Gilead Sciences, and I promised that I would unveil two new positions this week.

The types of clients who have established or who would be excellent candidates to create donor-advised funds include the following.

I’ve seen many positive changes in the advisory business over the past three decades. Fees have gone down and diversification has gone up. Advisors are a large part of the reason flows are moving from expensive active to low-cost passive funds. This has been good for our clients. Still, we have further to go, and having advisors address these 10 failures in their practices will help us get there.

Historically, the key to attracting clients was telling your story in a compelling fashion. Going forward, being articulate and persuasive will still be important – but not as much as having a differentiated and compelling story to tell in the first place. In fact, only those advisors who offer truly differentiated value to clients will be successful.

Dan Fuss has established himself as one of the most respected bond investors in the industry over his 60-year tenure. In a talk last week, Fuss warned investors of geopolitical uncertainty and higher rates in credit markets.

Morningstar’s Fund Manager of the Year is one of the most coveted awards in the mutual fund industry. Indeed, fund companies devote enormous resources to promoting award recipients. But should advisors invest their clients’ funds with those winners?

The Fed will enter uncharted waters as it begins to reduce its balance sheet, in addition to raising short-term interest rates. How should investors respond?

Are high-quality businesses as overvalued as the broader markets and will that bode ill for our future investment returns?

Here’s my shocking idea on the best way to grow your practice.

We have announced our Venerated Voices™ awards for commentaries published in Q3 2017. Rankings were issued in three categories: The Top 25 Venerated Voices™ by Firm, The Top 25 Venerated Voices™ by Author and The Top 10 Venerated Voices™ by Commentary.

The perfect meeting maximizes the possibility of converting a prospect into a client. Here’s the ideal way to structure that meeting.

These crucial keys will make your presentation concise and powerful.

When I talk to advisors whose businesses are growing, I am struck by the extent to which they’ve changed and adapted the way they work. It’s not just that the things that made you successful in the past won’t lead to success in future. More alarming for many advisors, continuing to do the things that you’ve done to this point is a guaranteed prescription for failure.

With growing client expectations and very a competitive marketplace, financial advisors must continue to seek more and better ways to differentiate themselves, i.e., “beyond better sameness.”

We made a mistake and put someone in a role that was over their head.

LinkedIn has become an effective site for communicating between advisors, prospects and centers of influence. My recent experience illustrated how advisors should respond to inquiries from a LinkedIn contact.

According to Philip Palaveev, the most successful firms have the most talented and competent advisors and support staff. This doesn’t happen by accident. These firms are better at developing the skills of younger advisors and staff members. Here’s how they do that.

Nearly a decade after the onset of the global financial crisis, real economic growth remains constrained by high levels of household debt, particularly for those in the bottom 80% of the income distribution. The build-up of indebtedness in these households that largely pre-dated the crisis continues to cast a shadow over the real economy.

The bulk of U.S. stock gains in this long-running bull market are due to one variable: the expansion of the price-to-earnings ratio.

I offer a probability-based framework that captures the true nature of investment reward and risk.

For 23 years DALBAR, Inc. has been publishing a research report reaching the conclusion, year after year, that investors underperform the investment vehicles that they invest in due to “poor investor decision making.” Wade Pfau recently discovered, however, that this conclusion is the result of a serious calculation error. Now, using Pfau’s results, I will prove that the evidence actually shows that investors do not underperform their investments.

Do you think you’re wasting your time pursuing Millennials as clients because they don’t have enough money? If so, you’re wrong.

Here are the key takeaways from events and interviews for capital-growth investors during the past month. Focusing on strong companies with a competitive advantage offer opportunities, but it comes at a price.

With limited evidence of excess in the global financial system and mostly low interest rates around the world, we remain optimistic about global economic prospects. The expansion is poised to continue, led by growth in emerging economies.

A coaching client recently asked me to name the most critical traits an advisor needs to convert more prospects into clients. Here was my answer.

I will define a marketing funnel and explain why it is essential to your marketing strategy.

I recognize that as a leader it’s up to me to instill good communication practices across my team. But I have a couple of people who are gossips.

Here are the five things advisors should avoid to get investors to pay attention to them online.

Should you worry if organized crime has infiltrated the boards of the companies you own? Can you learn anything about how your investments will perform based on movie theater receipts? Two recent research studies answer those questions.

This article will tackle the “p-hacking” issue and propose a framework to help those who embrace evidence-based investing to make judicious decisions based on a more thoughtful interpretation of finance research.

It is still not too late to structure your portfolio to weather the global storm. The key is to own quality.

Tail-risk hedging strategies profit from significant market corrections. They may be used alongside or to replace traditional risk management strategies (e.g., diversification via asset allocation) where the core portfolios have a significant allocation to equities or other volatile assets. This type of insurance is now priced very attractively relative to historical levels and is a cost-effective way to insure against equity drawdowns.

This is the third of my four-part empirical research into the fallacy of the random walk view of investment reward and risk. Part 1 and Part 2 discussed the random walk's failure in portraying asset returns. A random walk depicts risk as volatility.

Most of us view our investment portfolio as numbers on a screen. However, investments represent money that we set aside for some future purpose or goal. Are we investing with that goal in mind?

Changes to the tax code and the Fed’s impact on interest rates are some of the topics we explore for income-oriented investors.

Engineers (like all other groups) have well-defined personality traits. If you want to convert them, you need to understand what makes them tick.

After working with clients for over 20 years, I believe I have insights and information I could share more broadly and am considering writing a book.

In case you missed it, on September 7, APViewpoint hosted one of the best debates ever regarding the fiduciary standard and the DOL rule. It was notable because unlike most of what you’ve been reading, it covered both sides of the topic, and the debaters forced each other to provide deeper rationales for their beliefs. Here are my key insights, particularly those that illustrate the thinking behind the anti-fiduciary mindset.

I’ll discuss the risks of investing in cryptocurrencies, an update on the current state of the crypto markets and how to invest.