Dave Gilreath

What is the one thing nearly every investment adviser, financial planner or grandpa would tell you is the most important attribute of a solid portfolio? Diversify. In other words, don’t put your eggs in one basket-right? It makes perfect sense to any rational person and is almost a religion among some in the financial-planning community. Planners use fancy-schmancy software to “optimize” asset allocation and will plot your portfolio vs. “the efficient frontier” in order to fine-tune your risk and potential…

The other day, a client asked me the following question about the stock market: “How are we going to play the downside when the next president is a Democrat and raises taxes?” That question has three assumptions in it: Presidents who are Democrats raise income taxes. The stock market will drop if taxes are raised. The next president will be a Democrat. For more than five decades, tax rates on personal income have basically been dropping. In the 1950s, the…

Over the last few months, I’ve gotten to know an expert in the trust business by the name of Charlie Mosbrucker. He is a former trust officer and lawyer who spent more than 22 years working in various trust departments. Over the last decade or so, the trust business has evolved and, as he says, “Today’s trust company is not your grandfather’s trust company.” When I think of a trust company, my image is that of a chubby white-haired guy…

I hated chemistry class in high school. Beakers and Bunsen burners were fun, but memorizing the periodic table of elements was torture for my ADD brain. All those little boxes with different colors stacked up in rows with the twoletter symbols and numbers of protons and neutrons boggled my mind. Today, though, a periodic table provides valuable instruction in my business. I am not talking about the periodic table with hydrogen, einsteinium and nobelium on it. The table valuable to…

After the market swoon a few weeks ago (which I said in this column on Jan. 8 and Feb. 5 was overdue), you might be feeling a bit woozy. You might be weak in the knees, but it’s time to take a big whiff of smelling salts and turn bullish. Even if you are a bull, you are not bullish enough. With the pullback, you might have been lucky enough to catch the market wiggle, but it is time to…

One benefit of writing a column is, the reader rarely remembers for long what the writer says. Maybe readers don’t remember what stock market columnists prognosticate because they think we’re windbags and change our opinions willy-nilly. For example, a month ago, I wrote the market was looking like it might pull back 10 percent and two weeks later wrote about the case for a market “melt-up.” Willy-nilly? I don’t think so, because both events could happen. But a year from…

If you are reading this before Christmas Day, you most likely have only about 24 hours of shopping time left to find that last stocking stuffer. What are you doing reading this now? Get out there and finish shopping! Or, if you are reading this after Christmas Day, I hope Santa was good to you. Unless something dramatic happens to the stock market in the last two weeks of the year, your portfolio should be shouting “hoho-ho” with gains for…

A couple of weeks ago, I explained that if in your golden years you place too little of your portfolio in stocks, then live too long, you run a high risk of running out of money before you run out of time. For older people, their fear is permanent loss of principal. Although people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s all know they need growth of principal, the fear of loss keeps many of them from getting enough growth to…

A comic named Irwin Corey, who calls himself the Professor, once said, “If we don’t change direction soon, we’ll end up where we’re going.” You had better open up your statement and listen to the Professor, because where your stocks are going might not be where you want to end up. If you have a big position in a value stock, or value mutual fund, it’s time to make some changes. It’s time to increase your exposure to good, old…