WrapManager's Wealth Management Blog

Here’s a statistic that may catch your eye (or make it shed a tear): since 1980, total mutual fund assets have increased by 135 times, but the total expenses paid to equity mutual-fund managers has increased 141 times ($170.8 million to $24,143 billion).1 Have your investment fees, or the fees you pay to your financial advisor, been going up as well? 3 Actions You Should Take to Examine Your Investment Fees [+] Read More

Federated Investor's Senior Equity Strategist, Linda Duessel, offers a Weekly Update. Below your find an excerpt from the week of April 22, 2016. If you're interested in reading the full report, download it here. [+] Read More

Polen Capital Management's Focus Growth Portfolio continues to deliver solid double‐digit earnings per share growth, which is quite distinct from the broader market right now. Read their quarterly commentary to learn how their team believes this strong ongoing earnings per share growth will continue to support strong long‐term investment returns. [+] Read More

Changes in marital status can have a big impact on your retirement planning. Retirement account balances, eligibility for pensions, and even Social Security benefits can all be affected by divorce or death. It’s a common misperception that living singly will be half as expensive as living as a couple. In fact, expenses generally drop only about 20% due to housing, insurance, and other costs. What can you do now to prepare for the possibility that your marital status may change later on? Let’s take a look at the ways retirement benefits could be affected. [+] Read More

Quizmaster, Doug Hutchinson, has come up with another great quiz. This time he tests our knowledge of how currency risk can impact an investment. Good luck! Consider this scenario: Your friend Katrina bought $10,000 of an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) that tracks the performance of an index of Japanese equities. [+] Read More

When it comes to investing and retirement planning, there’s one certainty everyone must address as part of their planning: there are a lot of uncertainties. Of course, as an investor you’ve known that all along. Market returns are unpredictable in any given year. But it doesn’t end there – investors sometimes miss the other, lesser emphasized variables that create different kinds of uncertainties over time. We’re talking about factors like: you and your spouses’ life expectancies, the inflation rate over time, and the levels of cash flows you expect to take over your lifetime. All of these factors impact how your portfolio value will change over time. [+] Read More

Retirement sometimes means being busier than ever, and for some that’s because you have re-entered the workforce with a new passion or a new project (the income is nice too). If you’ve returned to work or are thinking about it, it’s important to consider how your additional retirement income could affect other parts of your investment plan. Walk through these five questions with your financial advisor to see how you might be affected. 1) How Will the Income Affect My Social Security Retirement Benefits? If you are already collecting Social Security retirement benefits, and you are below the normal retirement age (between 66 and 67 for those born after 1943), then your benefits will likely be reduced depending on how much income you are making. The law states that for every $2 you earn above the annual limit ($15,720 for 2016), you get $1 less of Social Security benefits. This is known as the “earnings test.” [+] Read More

ClearBridge Investment's Hersh Cohen comments on the first quarter of 2016 regarding rallying oil prices and investor caution approaching the election. [+] Read More

Passive investing – which is also categorized as index investing or simply ‘investing in Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs)’ – has gained popularity in recent years within the investment community. In 2015 alone, roughly $150 billion moved out of mutual funds while $150 billion moved into ETFs (according the Thomson Reuters). It is probably a coincidence that the money moving in and out was nearly the same, but that’s not the point anyway. What is clear is that ETFs are gaining popularity while enthusiasm for mutual funds is fading, and this is a trend that has been going on for years.1 Performance and fees are probably two key drivers of the sea change. Over the last 20+ years, the percentage of active managers (mutual funds and otherwise) that outperform passive indexes can range anywhere from 10% to 80%, but from year to year the actual number fluctuates widely.2 If an investor has a manager or managers that have a couple of years underperforming their benchmark (usually an index), the investor might grow tired of paying management fees and decide to take a passive approach instead. The theory behind taking a passive approach is fairly simple – it offers the investor less in management fees with index-like returns. But does it? There are two little-discussed flaws with the passive approach that can be influential (and detrimental) to performance. [+] Read More