Our Weekend Word

The pleasantly brisk mornings of fall are starting to become more frequent, and many parents are still reeling from writing those first tuition checks of the school year.  College is becoming an insurmountable and somewhat terrifying expense for many these days, but there are a few savings vehicles that can help us battle its high costs with the power of tax deferred growth. Here’s the quick rundown on the three we see most often.

With preseason winding down and the NFL season only a few weeks away, many people are suring up their fantasy football teams.   In the twenty odd years after the internet really took hold Fantasy Sports have seen a meteoric rise.  In the early 1990’s there was only a few million fantasy sports players, but last year that number was almost 60 million!†  Where there is rapid growth, there is opportunity.

Pittsburghers are used to a certain amount of national spotlight because of our exceptional sports teams and uncanny ability to be represented nearly everywhere you travel. This month, however, the clamor around the Burgh may be a bit more heightened than usual.

With the first week of 2016 Summer Olympics almost in the books we thought It would be a good time to take a look at the games.  As of Thursday morning the United States is leading the gold medal count with 11, and leading overall with 32.  It should be little surprise that Katie Ledecky and Michael Phelps have been the biggest contributors to those totals with 3 gold medals each.

As many of you know by now there is a new mobile phone game out that was sweeping the world.  In light of all that was going on in the world Pokémon Go quickly became the fastest growing app in history and has been downloaded an estimated 75+ million times!  That is more than the populations of Pennsylvania, New York and California combined!

“An Investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” – Benjamin Franklin

In all his wisdom and imagination, I’ll bet Ben probably never imagined this play on words would apply literally to global bond markets.

Back in August 2015 we saw a sharp decline in global stock markets. (Isn’t it nice that feels like a while ago now.) These took place for a variety of reasons, but a major one was concern about China. The world’s second largest economy was falling on some hard times and talk was everywhere about their slowing growth. China’s growth is less than half of what it was in 2007! Who’s going to use all of the world’s commodities?! Global demand for oil is going to go away!

Rollovers are yet another mythical happening in the investment world. Like the Roth IRA, commercials love them, but they just sound like a lot of work. So what are these things?

It’s actually pretty simple. The term rollover refers to the movement of funds from a retirement account or IRA into another IRA.

No matter what side of the aisle you are on, the presidential election affects us all in more ways than most expect.  One question we get quite often is “What happens if Trump/Hillary win?”.  Unfortunately, we don’t know what will happen and while we can attempt to predict what might happen if Hillary or Trump wins, we thought it would be more impactful to give a historical perspective on the market during election years.

In light of the U.S. Open wrapping up this past weekend we’d like to congratulate Dustin Johnson on his first career major victory and talk about one of his competitors who was also recently in the spotlight.

Some of you may have seen in the news that Phil Mickelson got himself in a bit of a pickle with the SEC over some insider trading allegations.