Articles, tips & resources from the team at BFA.
They say that the eyes are a window to the soul, but there’s nothing like a financial windfall to provide a glimpse into our emotional undercurrents. The opportunity to invest new cash from a business sale, inheritance, or other source often makes even the most committed investor pull up short and ask, Is now really the best time to put more money into the market?
Last month, California voters narrowly approved the most sweeping changes to the state’s residential property taxes in a generation. There are winners and losers under Proposition 19’s new tax rules, but some homeowners may be able to preserve their benefits if they act quickly before Prop 19 becomes effective in a few weeks on February 16, 2021.
Is it really more difficult to learn new things as we grow older, or is it just that we stop trying? This was my question as I drove home from the first day of a one-week drawing workshop the summer before last. My head felt as if I’d been doing math problems all day, and I was a little stunned by how strenuous the class had been.
Today, we have about 4,000 publicly traded companies in the U.S. stock market and, according to the World Bank, nearly 40,000 companies around the globe, each with their own destiny in an ever-changing world. How can we identify the stocks that are likely to grow and prosper in the coming years so that our financial accounts will as well?
When the future is uncertain and we can’t see the way ahead, we have a choice. We can squint and work even harder to figure out the most likely path and bet on that. Or we can broaden our view to imagine a range of potential paths and make decisions knowing we’ll probably need to adjust as we move forward.
Nineteenth-century writer and futurist H.G. Wells would have had little patience today for anyone complaining that we couldn’t have foreseen the Covid-19 pandemic circling the globe. A celebrated visionary, Wells foresaw many of the defining inventions of the 20th century, including the airplane, space travel, and the atomic bomb.
Move over speed, efficiency, and optimization; resilience is the new sexy in business and personal finance. Who cares about maximizing profits and stocks for the long run when a pandemic is upon us? With today’s headlines screaming “U.S. Unemployment Rate Hits 14.7%, Worst Since Great Depression,” we’ll take just getting through the present moment.
Last month, as the turmoil of the global pandemic hit the markets with full force, there were reports of bank customers rushing to withdraw thousands of dollars in cash. A bank in Midtown Manhattan was “cleaned out of $100 bills,” as customers sought “psychologically reassuring stacks of bills.”
Passed on March 27, 2020, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act is the largest economic bill in U.S. history -- a $2.2 trillion emergency fiscal stimulus package designed to help ease the effects of the economic damage being caused by the coronavirus. It includes varied types of financial support for individuals, businesses, healthcare entities and state and local governments.
In the 1940’s, as the United States entered World World II, forest-fire prevention became a national security concern, particularly in California, where the dry forests were at risk of bombardment by sea. With most firefighters deployed abroad, the Forest Service needed a way to enlist help from a general public long accustomed to fires being somebody else’s responsibility.
Several decades ago, in search of a new pair of running shoes, I walked into a San Francisco shop so small it was almost possible to reach out and touch the display shoes on each of two long walls at the same time. The signage out front said “athletic shoes,” but most of the samples were for jogging or racing.
All toddlers are clumsy, but our son Max was at risk of a sidewalk face plant each time he toddled out the front door. Time and again, he’d run outside expecting the best, but it was a coin flip whether he’d make it to his destination or stumble and slap the concrete with outstretched arms once more.
The thief who stole my travel wallet at the Barcelona train station must have been a high jumper. Before sitting down on a bench to organize my papers, I’d been careful to make sure no one was around. After the theft, I found an escalator behind the bench, but it was still hard to believe: the thief must have run up the down escalator and leapt over the wall the moment I put my wallet on the bench to set down my backpack. A medal-worthy performance, except that it happened to me.
It was the early 1980’s, just after the debut of MTV and right before Apple launched the Macintosh personal computer. Future economics professor Campbell Harvey was considering what to study for his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Chicago. The world had just emerged from a traumatic recession, so he decided to see if there might be a way to anticipate the next slowdown. Intrigued by an academic paper written two decades earlier, he looked at whether the bond market held any helpful information, and panning through rivers of data, he found gold.
