Financial Symmetry News & Views

Archive for ‘How We See It’

The primary purpose of measuring risk capacity and applying it to an investment strategy is to prevent being forced to sell low.
In other words, we want to prevent short term risk from harming your long term security.
In operation, the higher your capacity for risk, the more of your portfolio can be allocated to stocks which [...]

Probably not, even though it may feel like it.
What’s Going On
The financial markets have been hit with a steady barrage of negatives.
Europe is still struggling to address the problems inherent in the Euro — namely that they have a currency union but not a political union.
Here in the US the short term budget deficit caused [...]

Yesterday was certainly a stressful day for US investors.  Watch as Chad talks with Steve Daniels of ABC 11 Eyewitness News about the best way to react to the recent stock market moves.

The total United States government spending for fiscal year 2011 is budgeted at $3.82 trillion. Of that amount we are borrowing $1.65 trillion in order to be able to pay all of our obligations.  If the debt ceiling is not raised by August 2nd, effectively shutting down the government, we would have to the fill [...]

As most people know, healthcare costs have been rising much faster than other areas of our economy for decades.  The chart below demonstrates what will happen to federal spending levels if healthcare costs continue to rise too quickly.  Despite what some are saying, it is clear that other areas of federal spending- including social security [...]

As mentioned in our previous blog post about the debt ceiling, we said that our long term fiscal problem is heavily influenced by two issues- taxation and health care costs.
There is a school of economic theory that says that the level of taxation has a strong inverse relationship with economic growth.  In other words, some [...]

There has been quite a bit in the news lately regarding the United States government hitting the legal debt limit set at $14.3 trillion.  The Treasury Secretary has sent a letter to Congress warning them that if they fail to act by August 2, there will be dire consequences associated with what would amount to [...]

We all hear about how the US is going broke. Depending on the viewpoint or agenda of the source of what we hear, read or see, the cause of the federal government’s financial problems varies.
Unfortunately, there is almost always a lack of actual facts and perspective, so the public is left to try to [...]

The tragedy in Japan continues to be the top news story and warrants international support.  While the human aspect of this crisis continues to be devastating, we can’t discount the economic impact as well.  Well respected international fund family, First Eagle Funds, was heavily allocated to Japanese investments before the tsunami hit.  To find out [...]

This is one of the more common questions we hear about the amount of prospectuses, annual reports, etc. that our clients receive from their investment companies.  Would you believe that this much disclosure could actually be bad for you?  Especially when it comes to the financial services industry, more disclosure is a benefit to the [...]