WealthVest, a financial services marketing and wholesaling firm, announced today the publication of a new research paper focused on the successes and failures of 60/40 portfolio allocations since 1928. The paper, titled “Rethinking 60/40: How Multi-Year Guaranteed Annuities Can Help”, examines alternative options to help protect against 60/40 negative years.

WealthVest and Wade Pfau, PH.D., CFA, RICP, release a special edition book, Redefining Retirement: A Safe and Secure Way Down the Mountain. The book features the culmination of Pfau's research on lifetime income and the role of annuities, and a guide on how financial professionals can utilize the concepts from the book with their clients.

March 2020 began a vicious market decline that saw portfolio values collapse. On March 23rd the Dow hit a low of 18,213.65*. This was not the first market correction that occurred this century. The first few years of the early 2000’s were marred by the losses of the Dot-com bubble bursting, and fast forward to 2008, we saw the housing bubble burst and the beginning of the “Great Recession.” While, markets have greatly recovered this year, the tumultuous nature of the first few months greatly depleted investors savings.

In this episode of WealthVest: The Weekly Bull & Bear Season 2 Episode 29, recorded on June 22nd, Drew and Grant discussed a $2 trillion influx in bank deposits, the best and worst performing sectors since the Covid-19 crisis, May retail sales, Empire State manufacturing, The Fed's corporate bond buying program, warning signs for the dollar, P.E. in 401ks and new issues Amazon must contend with.

The dynamic of life expectancy increasing over one’s lifespan is referred to as the longevity paradox. WealthVest’s newest series, The Longevity Paradox, dives into the risks retirees face. With life expectancy growing over the past century, retirees must plan for an indefinite retirement timeline. Planning for longevity, while balancing investor behavior and market conditions, proves that retirees face an uphill battle when creating a lifetime income plan. Our first paper in the Longevity Paradox series tackles options retires can use to help combat these issues. This is a consumer approved resource that can help guide today’s retirees to options that help mitigate longevity and behavioral risk in retirement.

With the Covid-19’s stock market sell off in March, and subsequent rebound over the last few weeks, it is important to look at the metrics that might define the bottom of a market. Timing the bottom of a market correction is an exercise in futility, but it is important to understand some of the fundamental and technical metrics that can help investors contextualize the price of the market.

When I sat down in early February to reevaluate the piece, What’s Your Favorite Fixed Income Alternative, the 10-year treasury hovered near historic lows, by March, they had plunged further than many expected. March was the most volatile month we’ve seen since the Great Depression, not only in equities, but in bonds too. U.S. sovereign debt has traded at highest highs, with yields dropping to .318% on the 10-year and 1.34% on the 30-year*. Falling interest rates have resulted in gains for bond funds and bonds trading in the secondary market. With bonds trading at record highs, talk to your clients about potential bond alternatives for a few reasons.

Have you heard of structured annuities, buffered annuities, registered index-linked annuities or variable index annuities? With so many different names for the same product line it can become confusing but since LIMRA uses registered index-linked annuities (RILAs), I will use it to describe the fastest growing segment in the annuity space and give reasons why sales are accelerating so rapidly.

You are undoubtedly getting phone calls each and every day from your weary and worried clients about what they should be doing with their investments and how today’s events will affect their financial plan. You’ve helped navigate them through the ups and downs of the market in the past, but this is the first time guiding them through a worldwide pandemic. What do you tell them?

Are you prepared?