Here’s something curious. This week The Wall Street Journal published the results of a survey it conducted with several thousand swing state voters. The paper asked about political preferences, naturally, but its questions extended into the survey respondents’ views of the economy. According to the Journal, about three-quarters of respondents said inflation had moved in the wrong direction over the …
How Much Do Our Pets Cost?
To say that the Park Piedmont team is a group of animal lovers would be an understatement. Tom, Nate, George, and Heather are all dog owners, while Sam, Leslie and I are owned by our cats. Catching a glimpse of someone’s pet while on a Zoom meeting is frequently a highlight of our workday. We also love it when we get …
TCJA Tax Update
If the words “tax code” immediately make your eyes glaze over … well, you wouldn’t be alone. Jeff Sommer of The New York Times recently wrote that, unfortunately, “navigating the byzantine U.S. tax rules … may be enough of a headache. But you can count on fresh tax stress coming from Washington not far down the road.” That’s because significant parts of the Federal …
Your Best Investment
What’s the best investment you’ve ever made? Reflexively, some might point to a particular stock in their portfolio – maybe they took a flier on Berkshire Hathaway a few decades ago or bought Amazon when it was primarily an online book seller. Some lucky few might shine their light on something more tangible: a garage sale masterpiece or a rookie baseball card of …
Black Swans & The Certainty of Uncertainty
Rarely but inevitably, a single event will flip the world upside down – the kind of improbable, unexpected thing that occurs on a day just like any other, but then alters life as we know it. Sometimes that thing is devastating, such as a freak accident or the sudden death of a loved one. Sometimes it’s delightful – a newfound …
The Random Quilt of Wall Street
A picture is worth a thousand words, as the old saying goes. The “quilt” chart below, prepared by JP Morgan Asset Management, colorfully demonstrates many of the points Park Piedmont Advisors has made over the years. Several of them derive from Burton Malkiel’s 1973 classic, A Random Walk Down Wall Street: While the stock and bond markets have produced positive returns …
2023 Year-End Market Update
We had no idea what the 2023 year-end market update would look like a year ago. As it turns out, the year ended with US stocks up 26 percent, as measured by the US Total Stock Market index fund. The total bond market was up 6.8 percent. Inflation cooled in late 2023 to a 3.4 percent annual inflation rate – …
Temporal Landmarks & Fresh Starts
Recently, I asked other Park Piedmont team members whether they had resolutions for 2024. Since our last new year’s article on intentions for life and money, I’ve been curious about the various ways people ring in each new year, and why – despite our differences – so many of us decide that January 1 is the perfect day to plan how we …
An Unflashy Yet Proven Investment Approach
November was a great month for stocks. The S&P 500 – a stock market index that tracks the performance of 500 of the biggest companies in the US – performed better in November than it has all year. By December 1, it had risen over 10 percent from its late-October low, gaining all the ground it had lost earlier this year. …
The Benefits of Tax-Loss Harvesting
One of Park Piedmont’s primary goals as a firm is to focus on thoughtful long-term planning for our clients’ financial lives. One important but often overlooked example of this planning involves tax-loss harvesting (TLH). As described in more detail below, tax-loss harvesting opportunities aren’t necessarily available every year. But when they are, as in 2022 and possibly this year as …