I find myself often turning to Yahoo! Finance or BigCharts to access charts on certain historical data.
Yesterday I came across a useful site that contains a fairly abundant amount of historical charts ranging from domestic equity through precious metal and commodity performance for quite a few periods.
Update 09/15/08 8:53AM PDT: If you landed here on a search, click here to read the latest post about exam results!
Just a quick note to those nervous readers who sat for the July 2008 CFP® Certification Examination.
I received a note on anxiety over the test results from Ken Zahn and his staff. Here’s the important part!
As we approach the end of your wait, you may be concerned about the release of the exam results. Fortunately, your anxiety will end shortly. According to CFP Board …
I finally managed to read the recent interview of Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Portfolio.com that I blogged about a few weeks ago. I mentioned that Mr. Taleb is scheduled to deliver one of the three keynote sessions during the FPA Boston 2008 annual conference.
Now there are a few things that Mr. Taleb said during his conversation with Lloyd Grove that I think might rub a number of FPA members the wrong way. Here are a few of the things that stood out.
Taleb On Ties
Grove: And this “hating ties” business, and I know you’re being funny, but you distrust people who wear ties?
Taleb: It correlates rather well with incompetence.
Sometimes I manage to stumble across fairly good personal finance articles on the Yahoo! Finance homepage, a typical stop on my early morning Internet circuit.
Today’s story is a feature from CNN Money titled Millionaires in the Making. They highlight a young couple, John and Gina Rodrigues, who are in their late 20’s earning a healthy combined salary, saving a lot, and practicing frugal spending habits.
Although, one of Mr. Rodrigues’ past attempts at being frugal actually borders on fraud. Here’s the clip:
In the last month or two, I have received a number of new reports that focus on operations and technology in the financial adviser space. These reports do a fair job of identifying some of the trends of technology used in a wide variety of firms and some of the reasons why advisers have been slow to roll out new technology.
The first report is the 2008 FPA Practitioner Technology Report – Leveraging Technology Solutions. This report uses results from an online survey taken by 291 random FPA members in February 2008. Respondents consisted of the following categories:
The majority of participants (72 percent) reported revenue of $1 million or less.
When you have a moment, check out Matt Abar’s WealthFly blog and his review of Russ Thornton’s Wealth Simplified blog.
In the review, Russ provides an excellent list of software and other websites and blogs that Russ turns to on a regular basis. I thanked Russ for highlighting FPPad.com in his list of blogs.
Thanks Russ!
This morning I saw Tim Ferris’ tweet (Tim, author of The 4-Hour Work Week) about an interview of Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Portfolio.com. Most members of the Financial Planning Association should know by now that Taleb will be one of the keynote speakers at the FPA Boston 2008 annual convention.
Click here to read Taleb’s interview at Portfolio.com.
It’s an excellent interview, if not a little lengthy, but definitely put this on your weekend reading list.
One of the FPA NexGen members posted a message to the general email list about a new initiative called OneVoiceRIA. The primary goal of OneVoiceRIA is to raise public awareness of Registered Investment Advisers.
Visit OneVoiceRIA at their website, www.onevoiceria.com.
The organizers of OneVoiceRIA include:
Yesterday I responded to a question on the Financial Planning Magazine online discussion boards about running tax illustrations and comparisons using Excel.
A few years ago I came across Glenn Reeves’ Excel 1040 tool. This is a handy and fairly comprehensive tool based in Excel that does a good job performing many of the common calculations that populate Form 1040. Included are worksheets to enter W-2 income, Form 1099 distributions, Social Security, Schedule B Interest and Dividends… the list goes on and on.
Another update as of 8/14/08, see below and also read comments from Carol Lee Roberts, CFP®, Managing Director of Examinations and Education for the CFP Board.
Initially I wasn’t going to say anything about my recent experience with the CFP Board and some of the technical issues I have encountered over the last few months. But today the third issue came up, and I’m beginning to get concerned that operations inside the CFP Board aren’t going as smoothly as possible.
Back in June (after the exam registration deadline), I received an email message from the CFP Board that indicated either my payment or my registration was incomplete. Calls flooded the Board from concerned exam applicants. It turned out the email was sent in error to most (all?) applicants and we were told not to worry; our registration for the exam was not in jeopardy. Nevertheless, be still my beating heart!
