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APPLYING PRACTICAL INSIGHT TO
COMPLEX FINANCIAL CONCEPTS

Karen Firestone has spent over thirty years honing skills applied to
the investment world, while at the same time navigating a path through the work/familyscape. She considers many issues from an unusual angle, including stock market movement, factors facing professional women today, and how to think in simple terms about some complex financial structures. Karen shares her observations in posts that also appear in the Harvard Business Review and Huffington Post. As the CEO of Aureus Asset Management, a former fund manager at Fidelity Investments, and the mother of four grown children, Karen has a rare perspective into which she injects humor and some irreverence.

WSJ: The New Business Banker: A Private-Equity Firm

One of the reasons that “official” interest rates are staying low is that the shadow lending economy has so much available cash to finance deals that traditional banks won’t.  PE firms are big players in the game now too. Read the full article in The Wall Street Journal

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WSJ: Business-Loan Drought Ends for Banks

This WSJ article highlights the acceleration in U.S. bank lending, which had curiously slowed the last couple of years despite solid economic fundamentals. Reasons for the deceleration included political uncertainty leading up to and after the Presidential election, as well as uncertainty regarding healthcare and tax reform. Now with some more clarity around these issues…

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NYT: Profits Are Soaring. The Stock Market Has Barely Noticed.

This article points out what we’ve observed, that U.S. corporations are experiencing very strong earnings and revenue growth but the stock market, which worries and predicts the future, is skeptical that this won’t last.  The tug of war is likely to continue through 2018, but the bulls have the latest upper hand. Read the full…

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WSJ: Impatient Investors Get Caught in the ‘Return Gap’

This morning, the WSJ article had a piece similar to our most recent Investment Perspectives on market timing and the impact to investor returns. There is a lot of overlap between the two pieces but there are a few stats in the WSJ article that were interesting, particularly about which types of funds’ investors “market…

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