Each year, the National Association of College and University Business Officers and Common Fund Institute produce a study on the returns of college endowments.[1]  This study tracks the results of University investment portfolios by size of their endowments.  Of the schools participating in the study in 2016, more than 93 had endowment assets exceeding $1-billion.² Schools such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton and Notre Dame all have endowments over $1-billion and their returns were contributed to the study…

The financial industry analyst firm Dalbar has been tracking investor returns for more than 30 years. Their studies take into consideration general investor cash inflows and outflows into equities over time and its effect on performance…

The Federal Reserve was created in 1913, when President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law. While the Fed has many general responsibilities, its main one is to maintain the stability of the financial system and…

You may have heard our brand promise at Lutz Financial: “Mind What Matters”. While catchy and cute in the marketing sense, it is also very consistent with our approach in working with clients on a daily basis. We spend time working on the…

Studies have shown that over longer time periods actively managed funds are outperformed by their respective index benchmarks. In one such recent study, Standard and Poor’s¹ released that more than 79% of US Large-Cap funds are…

It’s an important distinction that we as investors need to get correct in our minds. Do I own a “market” or a collection of businesses? All too often, investors fall into the trap of thinking that the market is a beast that is prone to violent swings that…

We hear it all of the time, “the stock market is volatile.” When we think about it in general terms, the word “volatile” has a negative connotation and can be quite scary. A Thesaurus gives synonyms for volatile as erratic, unsettled, unstable…