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Posts by Scott MacKillop:

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Risk and return. They are fellow travelers, but they couldn’t be more different. Return is easy to measure. It’s a number. It happened. We can all agree on it. Measuring risk is hard. It’s a concept. It has no precise definition. It looks different to different people on different days in diff

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Lately, I’ve read quite a few articles about the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to boost the performance of investment portfolios. The pony ridden by AI is off to a bad start in that race. A June 2nd article in Yahoo Finance points out that the AI Powered Equity ETF (AIEQ) has a 1-year

Scott's Column

When markets decline, client anxiety increases. The correlation between the two never varies. Last year was a good example. Stocks down. Bonds down. Client anxiety was very high. The cause of this anxiety is mainly attributable to one thing. We hate uncertainty. Our brains crave certainty. In fact,

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I turn 72 tomorrow.  Many of my contemporaries have already retired and many more are plotting their “exit strategies.”  Not me.  I love this stuff. Sometimes I wonder if there’s something wrong with me.  Shouldn’t I be yearning for the easy life where I can do whatever I want whenever I

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There’s no such thing as Easy Street. A small group of us launched First Ascent a little over seven years ago with the goal of creating the best TAMP for RIAs who want a team of experts to manage portfolios for their clients. We had no track record, clients, or outside financial backing. Who’s c

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Successful long-term investors have one thing in common. Patience. Good things take time. Close relationships. Building trust. Growing a family. Learning a craft. The Green River you see in the photo took 300 million years to carve its way through the Canyonlands outside Moab, Utah. It’s breathtak

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By Rick Cooper - Death ValleyUploaded by PDTillman, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18920959 Each of us is on this earth for a very short time. Barely a blip on the radar screen of history. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make a difference. I was riding my bicycle through Death Valley earlier this year and came across a place called the Artist’s Palette. It is a beautiful patchwork

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Ouzel Lake in the Wild Basin area of Rocky Mountain National Park is a peaceful place. Especially on an early Fall morning after the first snowfall. My wife and I reached it on an icy trail surrounded by waterfalls and beautiful views of the rugged mountains that define the edges of the Wild Basin.

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Pundits keep predicting that big will “dominate” small in the financial advice space. I ain’t buyin’ it. The big wirehouses have been around forever and they have been losing ground not gaining it. Mark Hurley predicted decades ago that the independent advisory business would consolidate int

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I returned to the scene of the crime last weekend–the Manitou Incline. The Manitou Incline is a beast. It’s a stairway that rises over 2,000 vertical feet straight up the side of a mountain in less than a mile. (It’s 1,454 feet to the top of the Empire State Building.) In September, I cl

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Direct indexing portfolios are broadly diversified portfolios of individual stocks that are personalized to meet the needs, values, and preferences of an investor. An Index Oriented Approach As its name suggests, direct indexing takes an index-oriented approach to investing. The investor, in consult

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Selecting a turnkey asset management provider (TAMP) to manage your clients’ assets is an investment decision.  Thus, it triggers your fiduciary responsibilities to your clients. The SEC made this clear in a Risk Alert issued July 21, 2021.  The Commission also provided a roadmap for advisors to

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