Savvy planners focus most of their time and attention on managing things they can know and control, and work hard to filter much of the noise associated with investing. At TWM we've developed the acronym “ADEPPTS” to help you focus on managing:

The stock market “climbed a wall of worry” in the second quarter, fending off concerns about Brexit and slowing growth patterns. During the quarter there was a sharp downtick within the general labor expansion, but recent evidence indicates that it was an aberration. Finally, the Fed signaled that it will be patient as far as interest rate policy.

Experts and pundits are notoriously bad at forecasting, in part because they aren't punished for bad predictions. Also, they tend to be deeply unscientific. Moreover, most of us engage in constant forecasting without even realizing it, and that can have an important impact on the way we think about investments. This podcast from Freakonomics Radio will help you rethink the subconscious ways in which we all take forecasting risk. The psychologist Philip Tetlock is finally turning prediction into a science -- and now even you could become a super forecaster.

The fiduciary rule will help to ensure that financial institutions act in investors’ best interests when providing retirement advice.

Do you understand what diversification does for your portfolio? While people generally know diversification is a good thing, they’re often not sure exactly how or why. Academic research has shown that investors don’t understand diversification's impact on volatility and expected returns.

by economist John Mauldin

An Open Letter to the Next President, Part 4, Where to Find $1 Trillion of Free Money, Making America Competitive Again, New York, Dallas, and Abu Dhabi

When you invest, it’s good to mix things up.  Diversity applies to many things in life—our friends, our colleagues, food, and sports—but it is most well known in the context of investing, and it’s commonly referred to as being diversified.

The beauty of a well-diversified portfolio is that you can come out ahead by sticking to the middle.

Are you really worse off after the recent drop in stocks?

Sharp increases or decreases in the stock market may have a lower impact on your financial plan than you think. Sometimes when you lose in one aspect of your plan, you gain in another. That’s the “Even Steven” concept.

Since the Federal Reserve recently raised short term interest rates by .25%, there has been a lot of discussion on the impact that will have on the Domestic and International markets. Open this article and examine 7 charts that explains the decision making process of the Federal Reserve that brought the first rate hike since 2006.

Take full advantage of the diversification and return of foreign stocks.  

Commodities and Emerging Markets have performed poorly in the last few years. Should you sell low?

While it would be fun to hold a Portfolio in which all of the asset classes were going up at the same time, it would be a nightmare if they were all moving down at once.

To protect against epic losses, investors seek uncorrelated returns — asset classes that behave dissimilarly so that a portfolio’s ingredients don’t all move in the same direction at the same time.

But diversified portfolios should be built with the knowledge that including uncorrelated assets means always having to endure pain in part of the portfolio. That part will be going down or remaining flat, since it tends to move differently from the uncorrelated part that is going up.

Debunking the Action Bias

At times like these, investors often wonder whether they should react to the market correction. The newest member of our gang here at TWM, Jordan Gentile, played goalie on his college soccer team. In our e-Letter this month, he offers this interesting analogy about how goalies tend to react when they face the ultimate pressure situation, a penalty kick. Most goalies “feel” like they need to do something, jump to the right or the left, to try to stop the shot. But statistics show they would be better off if they just stayed put in the middle.

The famous marshmallow test conducted in the 1960's showed that we have a hard time resisting instant gratification, even if we know that delaying gratification would lead to an even bigger reward. This, in short, is what makes investing and managing businesses so hard. Success requires many qualities, but conviction, discipline and thinking long-term must rank near the top....

This article was written by Dr. Meir Statman. Professor of finance at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business.

The Concept of Time Diversification

Asset allocation -- the mix of cash, bonds and stocks in a portfolio -- determines the spectrum of returns you will experience. Here's a great insight from Jack Bogle, founder of Vanguard...

Our time tested keys to investment success.

This article from Sunday’s New York Times updates data we've reported in the past about the Performance Gap suffered by the average mutual fund investor.

These are notes from The Intelligent Investor, one of the most important books ever written about investing. Written by Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett's mentor and professor at Columbia, it provides the margin of safety concept as well as the intellectual framework for many of our investment strategies. It outlines how one should think about the relationship between price/valuation and returns, as well as our approach to managing portfolios through market fluctuations. The chapter, The Investor and Market Fluctuations, should be considered required reading.