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The bear markets that began for all major US stock indexes between November 2021 and April 2022 got a reprieve in this year’s first quarter. The bear markets for domestic investment quality fixed income indexes began even earlier, from early to mid-2020, but likewise saw returns improve in this year’s first quarter. The worst returns [...]
I don’t always agree with what is written on The Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, but the following was part of a particularly insightful editorial from its year-end edition: "[F]ree money can’t last forever… is the reality that financial markets brought home in 2022 as U.S. stocks finally fell back to earth after being inflated [...]
Cryptomania is fast becoming a dangerous, money-losing proposition for investors, according to a recent bulletin from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The CFPB announcement dovetails with a flurry of reports last week about the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, leaving possibly more than 1 million creditors at risk of losing tens of billions of [...]
The Future Is Now Virtually all investors have suffered so far in 2022.  As the table shows, the traditional 60/40 stock/bond portfolio lost more than 20% of its value.  Even far less aggressive portfolio allocations experienced significant declines.  And most investors did even worse, because the most popular stocks substantially underperformed the major market indexes. [...]
Bridget O'Brien Swartz Joins Mission as Vice President & Fiduciary Counsel Phoenix, Ariz. - August 22, 2022 - Mission is pleased to welcome Bridget O’Brien Swartz as its Vice President & Fiduciary Counsel. Swartz will facilitate the expansion and development of trust services beyond the traditional offerings to also include settlement planning, qualified settlement funds, [...]
Almost No Place To Hide, Part II In the first half of 2022, the S&P 500 experienced its worst start in more than a half century, and bonds declined by more than in any other year on record. Falling by 16.1% in the second quarter, the S&P’s return for the first half was -19.6%. Again, [...]
The Mission portfolio team is not fond of cryptocurrency for many reasons. Basically, the cryptocurrency world is full of fraud—from the false allure and promise of Ponzi schemes, to poor security for crypto “wallets,” to “rug-pulls.” The latter (derived from the expression “pull the rug out from under you”) has become a popular scam in [...]