As a Savant client or friend, you’re invited to join an exclusive live webinar with Randal Quarles of the Federal Reserve Board about the COVID-19 crisis and its effect on markets, the economy, and business.
Read MoreIn this video, Savant CEO Brent Brodeski shares his insights about how the current crisis affects our sense of wellbeing in five different areas – career, social, financial, physical, and community.
Read MoreIn this article contribution to Citywire, a publisher of news and insight for professional advisers and investors around the world, Savant’s CEO Brent Brodeski shares his advice for confident leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Read MoreDuring this time of many unknowns, we’re very aware of today’s anxious and uncertain environment. Savant CEO Brent Brodeski discusses his hopeful outlook for the future in this video.
Read MoreAll of Savant’s physical locations will be closed through April 7 or until the “all-clear” is issued on the COVID-19 pandemic. In the meantime, we have become a remote workplace. Your Savant team, supported by robust and secure technology, continues to stand at the ready to serve your needs.
Read MoreWe are taking steps to make sure we can continue to serve you and maintain the health and safety of our clients and our team members as our nation deals with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Read MoreFiduciary: a legal term that has always been near and dear to us at Savant, a word that has long been toxic to brokerages and traditional investment firms, and a concept generally not understood by consumers at large.
In layman’s terms, a fiduciary is someone who is legally and morally bound to stand in your shoes, look through your eyes, and advise you and your family on important financial decisions in the same way he would make them for himself or
Read MoreThere’s no question that we experience emotional pain and anxiety when our portfolios are losing money due to market downturns. Behavioral scientists tell us that we feel losses twice as keenly as positive returns.
But that doesn’t tell us what we really want to know, which is: other than selling at the wrong time and locking in losses, how do we make these downturns less painful?
Economist Richard Thaler conducted a stock market experiment that offers
Read MoreCommunity foundations across the country are working hard to improve their local communities, but many people are not aware of how they work or the benefits of partnering with them. Here’s an example of how Savant partnered with the Community Foundation of Northern Illinois (CFNIL) in a guest blog from their president, Jon Bates.
Jon Bates, CFNIL President
In November, Savant Capital Management received the 2015 Best-in-Business IMPACT AwardTM, part of Schwab’s annual IMPACT Awards® program which recognizes excellence in
Read MoreI live just outside of Washington, DC, and I am surrounded by friends and family members who are either government employees or government contractors. Just a few days into this government shutdown, I am surprised by the number of people in the area who are already worrying about how they will pay their monthly bills. I sympathize with my friends who are losing their paychecks, but at the same time I’m surprised they have ignored one of the primary recommendations
Read MoreInvestment companies, brokers, and even financial advisors have pioneered clever ways to make themselves look far better than they actually are. Recently, in an article in the Journal of Financial Planning, a financial advisor laid out some of the most deceptive practices that he’s run across–practices which, to the untrained eye, can make an ordinary investment company or advice-giver look like a genius.
Such as? Suppose an advisor says that he has the rare ability to hand-select terrific investment opportunities
Read MoreWhen a former White House Budget director who famously never balanced the federal budget suddenly claims to have special powers to forecast a major economic crisis, it’s hard to understand why anybody pays attention. But recently David Stockman, who served as Ronald Reagan’s budget chief back in the 1980s, has gotten a lot of publicity for his fiery Easter Sunday article in the New York Times, telling us that America’s future is bleak and everybody should get out of
Read MoreOne of the more interesting myths in the investment world is that large financial institutions, with their access to mountains of data pored over by teams of staff economists, can determine where the markets are going and profit accordingly. Gullible investors believe this even though, every year, we can go back to the confident predictions of brokerage firm leaders and leading hedge fund managers and see a hard-to-explain gulf between expectation and reality.
This past 12 months, the broad U.S.
Read More
Sometimes it can be difficult to explain the cultural differences between financial planners and wirehouse brokers. However, at a recent financial services conference, author Michael Lewis–the celebrated author of Liar’s Poker, The Big Short, and Moneyball–talked about his own experiences as a broker and as a writer about brokers and their world.
Lewis told the audience that he had written Liar’s Poker, which is basically an expose of how Wall Street does business, as a kind of warning
Read More
President Obama’s speech on Afghanistan collected most of the headlines, but Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s press conference the same evening was, for some economists, more interesting. Among other things, Bernanke made it clear that the Fed was ending, on schedule, a widely-publicized initiative known as QE2, more formally referred to as the second round of quantitative easing by the U.S. Central Bank.
Some of you may
Read MoreIn this video blog, Brent Brodeski, CEO and Principal, and Adam Larson, Director of Investment Research, discuss the volatility of the market over the past few weeks and why we believe these fears are overblown.
Read MoreIn the aftermath of the November 2nd election, many investors are now wondering about the stock market implications related to the GOP seizing control of the House. Depending on your personal political persuasion, you are likely to jump to some conclusion. While it is easy to let your political bias cloud your view, we think looking at the evidence is far more instructive and likely a better barometer of what to expect.
Many hardcore liberals (typically Democrats) and conservatives (typically Republicans)
Read MoreIf you’re feeling a bit gloomy about the economy and the markets, you have a lot
of company these days. Despite U.S. stocks getting off to a positive start in the scary month of September, the news seems to be all about the possibility of a double-dip recession. One economist, David Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff, has suggested that the recession never ended despite positive economic growth in the first half of 2010. Meanwhile, the put-call ratio, which compares the number of
With the decade nearing a close, we were recently pondering what an amazing ten year period it has been. Companies that seemed invulnerable no longer exist. Others we had hardly known about or that were at the brink of extinction are now industry leaders, In sifting through our stacks of news clippings, we came across a number of tidbits from the more distant past that offer some important lessons. Big bets on the future that may be life-changing events for
Read MoreThe financial media seems to get things wrong more often than not. This is no surprise since communicating fear and anxiety seems to keep people tuned in when things are scary. The folly of relying on the predictions made by the media becomes apparent when you look at the pattern.
August 03, 2009
Climbing the Wall of Worry
US stocks extended their winning streak as the S&P 500® Index jumped 7.41% in July; it was the first time since 2003 that the index
Read MoreWelcome to SAVANTips! I am excited to post the inaugural message on my and my Savant colleagues’ new blog. We intend to opine on a variety of investment, financial, lifestyle, and other topics of interest. Some postings will discuss current events while others will convey timeless wisdom. We will also try to capture the thoughts and concerns on our advisory clients’ minds and share them with all our readers.
We hope SAVANTips will be unique. While I will share an occasional
Read More