News & Insights

Resources on Trusts, Investments, Estate Planning, Financial Issues, and Living Well

Bridget O’Brien Swartz, Vice President and Fiduciary Counsel for Mission Management & Trust Co., was recently named the 36th President of the National Association of Elder Law Attorneys (NAELA) Board of Directors. In addition to being an experienced lawyer, Bridget is a strong, compassionate leader, and one of the nation’s leading practitioners in special needs […]

In our April Quarterly Commentary (please visit 2023 1st Quarter Market Commentary - Mission Management & Trust Co.), I analyzed Warren Buffett’s counsel that in the short run the stock market is a voting machine, while in the long run, it’s a weighing machine. In the recently concluded second quarter, voters clearly dominated. Excitement and [...]
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. [...]