Evor C. Vattuone, Principal and Founder of Aspire Capital Management, is a Certified Financial Planning® professional, an active Board Member of the Financial Planning Association (FPA), East Bay Chapter, and a 5-star rated adviser with the Paladin Registry. Connect with Evor at .
September 19th, 2011 – 11:22 am Governor Perry for called Social Security a Ponzi scheme during the Republican debates last week. Perry: “It [Social Security] is a monstrous lie. It is a Ponzi scheme to tell our kids that are 25 or 30 years old today you’re paying into a program that’s going to be there.”
By getting it out on the table, he gives us a chance to refute this long-held belief that the Social Security system is a scam and doomed to fail. It is not a Ponzi scheme – here’s why.
August 17th, 2011 – 2:42 pm Since S&P downgraded U.S. treasury debt, and the administration and others pushed the idea that most of the blame was due to the inflexibility of the Tea Party. Calling this a “Tea Party downgrade” might be true in one sense. There weren’t enough members of the Tea Party to overcome the stubbornness of those refusing to make real spending cuts. On the other hand, Republicans in general were inflexible in terms of increasing revenue (taxes) – running away from the fact that we’ll all have to eventually chip in for the debt problem to actually cool off.
March 25th, 2011 – 6:09 pm Stocks and investors have proven to be surprisingly resilient despite a litany of alarming events that have triggered global uncertainty. It’s amazing that the markets are not lower than they are currently considering…
These events have dampened, but not broken investor optimism. The return of skepticism, though, might be a good thing as sentiment measures have dipped to more reasonable levels. Read the rest of this entry »
March 16th, 2011 – 12:37 am The Japanese market was already on its heels when the devastating earthquake and massive tsunami struck on March 11, 2011. And just as the country began to grasp the full extent of the disaster, the explosions in Sendai’s nuclear plants sent the Japanese stock market plunging. In just two days the Nikkei fell 16%. Wall Street followed loosely, with a drop of 1.7%.
A Historical Perspective
Markets are impossible to predict, but history may help guide our understanding. Our studies of crisis events have demonstrated that after a period of panic-induced weakness, stocks have generally recovered. Read the rest of this entry »
February 28th, 2011 – 9:11 pm This quote, taken from today’s issue of Investment News essentially means that Ameriprise (American Express Financial Advisors) estimates that they lost their clients $400 MILLION. Now, you may think, $400 Mil is not that much when compared to the total amount of investment dollars Ameriprise manages for clients, however, I’m thinking of the philosophical implications of these losses…not so much the dollar amounts.
Ameriprise is a company who, like so many other financial services firms, advertises that they’re on the client’s side, 100% of the time. Not true. I worked for AMEX Financial Advisors and their business runs the same today as it did when I was there in the late 1990′s. Internally, the side you don’t see unless you work there, is a meritocracy based on your “production numbers”. That is, the more revenue you earn from your client’s accounts, the better an advisor you are in the eyes of management. And the pay can be very lucrative for big producers through innumerable bonuses and payouts.
Guess what products have a great payout when sold? That’s right! Privately placed products such as the one’s sold by AMEX financial advisors.
So, as I’ve stated before, investing is not rocket science. You don’t need private investment vehicles that are expensive, and often times unregulated to make a lot of money in the markets!! You DO need discipline, common sense, and some decent, non-sales driven financial advice.
Just be aware of the risks involved when dealing with big, multi-million dollar firms who push “products” with commissions, kick-backs, tie-ins, any sort of payout trail, and generally seemingly expensive “financial hooks”. You can’t go too wrong by remembering that the bigger the cost for an investment generally means that the performance is inferior.
Please call us if you have any question or concern!
When to allow a Greek default
The financial news of the week again is about the eurozone and we are seeing lots of entities come up with lots of possible solutions about how to solve the eurozone problem. They all of course rest on what to do about Greece. The problem is, they are coming from the wrong angle. From STRATFOR’s (the geopolitical researchers) point of view, Greece does not have a particularly bright future as a state before the eurozone crisis is taken into account.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Evor C. Vattuone | Posted in Asset Management, Investing, Market Commentary | Tags: greece default, greek default | No Comments »