This month, we celebrate the 25 year anniversary of the founding of our firm. First and foremost, we want to thank YOU, our clients and friends of the firm, for your support and confidence over these years.

The end of the year represents the perfect opportunity to reflect on the last twelve months and to review your overall personal financial situation. We’ve now had a year to assess the impact of last year’s tax reform bill and to understand how your own tax situation was affected.

For Every Positive, There is a Negative - In the US, large cap stocks finished the quarter up close to 2%, but mid cap stocks were flat and small cap stocks lost about 2%. Outside of the US, developed market stocks were just barely negative but emerging market stocks were down over 4%. In commodities, gold posted a strong 4% return, but the broader commodity index lost 2%.

“Resulting” is a word that’s often used in the world of poker, and it was popularized by former World Series of Poker Champion Annie Duke in her excellent book, “Thinking in Bets”. As she describes it, resulting is “creating too tight a relationship between the quality of the outcome and the quality of the decision. You can’t use outcome quality as a perfect signal of decision quality, not with a small sample size anyway.”

The yield curve recently inverted, which means you now earn a higher rate of interest on two-year US Treasury bonds than you do on ten-year US Treasury bonds. In a “normal” environment, you should earn a higher rate of interest for locking up your money for a longer time period. I wrote about this concept last year as the yield curve was flattening, and it’s worth revisiting now that the curve has inverted.

We spend a lot of time helping clients plan for the future for themselves and their families. Our clients are successful financially, often accumulating significant wealth. We help them with estate planning and tax strategies to maximize that wealth. But unless you do that planning in the context of your broader, life planning goals, the process loses much of its meaning. We want to make sure you are living your ideal life and that your finances are woven into that life in a way that is meaningful for you and your family.