Welcome to “The Summit,” the official First Ascent blog.
If you’re looking for ways to build your practice, investment insights, or advice on how to communicate more effectively with clients and potential clients, then you’ve come to the right place.
Fees and Expenses: Do They Really Matter?
Fees Eat Up Return Fees and expenses are two of the most important factors to consider when investing. You can’t control the direction of the financial markets, but you can control what you pay to invest. Every mutual fund or exchange traded fund (ETF) in your portfolio has what’s called an “internal expense ratio.” This … Read More
Growth and Value: Understanding Investment Styles
Growth and Value: Two Styles of Stock Investing Stocks are often grouped into two distinct categories or “styles:” growth and value. Knowing the differences between the two and how to incorporate them into a portfolio can help investors smooth out the ride toward their long-term financial goals. Growth and Value Defined Growth stocks are stocks … Read More
Understanding Exchange Traded Funds – ETFs
What Are ETFs? ETFs are professionally managed, diversified portfolios of stocks, bonds, or other assets that are traded on an exchange. How Common Are ETFs? The first ETF debuted in 1993. Today there are over 2,000 ETFs available in the US. At the end of 2019, there was over $4.4 trillion invested in ETFs. Use … Read More
Big. Some firms say you should work with them because they are very, very big. But who wants to be just another number? Ever try to resolve a problem with your cable company or your health insurance provider? That’s what big looks like. Old. Some firms say you should work with them because they’ve been … Read More
Gaining an Edge – Understanding Factors
What Are Factors? Factors are characteristics common to a group of securities that help explain their returns. These characteristics are distinct and quantifiable and give rise to similar patterns of performance among the securities within the group that distinguish them from other securities over time. Decades of academic research has identified hundreds of factors. There … Read More
Marketing Timing May be Hazardous to Your Portfolio’s Health
An Elusive Dream The stock market goes up and the stock market goes down, as you can see below. Over time the trend is strongly upward, but there have been significant market declines along the way. Growth of the U.S. Stock Market 1926-2019 US Stock Market as represented by the Ibbotson SBBI US Large … Read More
There’s a growing gap between what we know and what we feel. We know that avoiding panic and staying in place is the best strategy during turbulent markets. History shows that patient investors are always rewarded, and market timing is a futile exercise. Yet our emotions tell us it’s time to do something. This excellent … Read More
Should You Be Worried About the Stock Market’s Fringe Players?
We recently ran across an article about a little corner of the Internet known as “r/WSB.” It’s where a modern-day version of day-traders hang out to share ideas, brag about their conquests, and sometimes try to move the market to their advantage. Here’s a link to the article: The article shows that the more things … Read More
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