Information, Communication, Back to Basics

Oct 28, 2011 | Banking, Europe, Market Commentary, Reading Recommendation, Videos

What an interesting month! Who would have thought it would turn out to be such a good month just a short 3 to 4 weeks ago? Many people actually, if you seek out alternative voices to that which you see in the daily paper or newscast. I talk about this in this week’s video below.

Also, I talk about how you should assess the level of communication in the past 2 to 3 months from your adviser. Did you hear from him/her? You sure as heck should have.

Lastly, now is a great time to get back to basics.

Click on video to hear more.

GWM- Video Transcript- 28 October 2011- Information, Communication, Basics

Hi there, Mike Brady with Generosity Wealth Management, here in Boulder, Colorado. It’s been a few weeks since I’ve done a video and sent a newsletter out. But my last video was about fifteen or sixteen minutes, and that was pretty long compared to my previous ones but I had a quarterly review and lots happening in the third quarter.

Today I’m thinking about two or three different things; the first one is information, the second is communication and the third is kind of getting back to basics.

Let me tell you what I mean by that; information. Three, four weeks ago, let’s not kid each other, you could not open up a newspaper or a magazine or watch, you know, some nightly news telecast without it all being negative. “If it bleeds, it leads.” And one of the responsibilities, I believe, of an investor and your financial advisor is not to get into a bunch of group think. I remember back in 1999, early 2000, when the internet boom was going on, if you poopa’ed any kind of an internet stock or tech company- you were just like “old thinking.” I remember Warren Buffet back in in 1998, 1999, was at a big conference of some type and yeah, there were all these internet people saying “oh God, he’s old thinking” “he needs to get with the new economy.” And, you know what, that took courage on his part, (of course he had a few billion behind him) to say “listen, I believe that your analysis is incorrect.”

Well frankly, three or four weeks ago everyone was saying the market stinks and the economy stinks, and there’s no way that it can go but down. And, that’s just not the case. I’m glad that the last quarter, excuse me, the last month has been a good month. Do I know exactly where it’s going to go-if it’s going to continue on its upward trend, is it going to reverse and go back to the down? No, I don’t. But I say that very humbly. And I watch things very closely. And I’m going to continue to have the right percentages.

I am going to next week, (assuming nothing major happens), in the next week or so, I’m going to do a video that I did about two or three months ago on information and confidence in your information. I did the video, and then so much stuff was happening in the month of August that I kind of had to put it in the can, I had to kind of put it to the side. But I want to do that because it is so relevant. I just listened to it before turning on this video, my camera here and I think it’s great and I’m very excited to share that with you.

Second thing is communication. A financial advisor sure as heck should reach out to clients and sure as heck should have been communicating with you. Because if you only hear from a financial advisor when things are going well, that’s a problem- in my opinion. You pay a financial advisor to help you, to set up a plan to hold your hand, you know sometimes, in the difficult times.

If you’re my client, you know that I gave you a call; that I reached out to you and that you’ve always got these videos and blogs and newsletters.

The last thing that I want to talk about is getting back to the basics. You know, I’ve always talked about estate planning, and tax planning, retirement planning. These are absolutely the core, essential pieces of what you should be doing for yourself. The market is going to go up, and it is going to go down, OK? I’m just telling you that. Up, down, sideways, three ways the market goes. And reassess for yourself how you felt this last quarter, and did you completely want to go off and completely change everything? No! (Hopefully not.) You need to have a plan, yes it needs to be modified accordingly, but hopefully you’re in partnership with somebody who will help tell you when “wow, we need to radically change this,” or only minimally change it, or maybe do nothing. That is proactively doing nothing is still doing something, OK? And so make sure that you get back to the basics; is your portfolio in line with what your risk level is? I think that’s absolutely essential and that’s some of the best advice that you can get.

Now I believe going forward that we’re going to have, so maybe I’m thinking of four things (!), I think we’re going to have some volatile markets and this is an opportunity for some tactical allocation, some dynamic asset allocation. So one of the things that I’m going to be talking about in the next quarter or so, for clients, is how that plays into your portfolio.

I think there are certain markets where this is… where having a more actively managed portfolio makes sense. And I think going forward that is going to be the situation because we’re having various trading ranges, increased volatility and lots of range trading and ex cetera.

So, anyway those are some of my thoughts. I guess it’s not quite as short a video as I thought. Sorry about that. But well, you could have hit pause at any time during this video!

Anyway, Mike Brady, Generosity Wealth Management, 303.747.6455. I would love to hear from you. If you’re my client I absolutely love you. If you’re not my client, I like you, but I’d love to get to love you. So please give me a call, or an e-mail; mike@generositywealth.com.

But anyway, you have a wonderful, wonderful day and a wonderful week, and we’ll talk to you later bye bye now.