Investment Philosophy

We believe in long-term investing. We subscribe to the Modern Portfolio Theory and effective diversification across dissimilar asset classes. We invest in a wide variety of asset classes with the goal of capturing the return on capital that inevitably global capital markets produce.

  • We're located in beautiful Historic Downtown Chestertown

    We're located in beautiful Historic Downtown Chestertown

  • Move your "Someday" closer with our IRA's.

    Move your "Someday" closer with our IRA's.

Financial Services

Financial Services

We provide investment and financial advice across the entire financial spectrum—and strive to make an extremely complicated field simple again
Read More
Advisors

Advisors

Martin Knight is a Certified Financial Planner™ and has passed the Series 7, Series 24, Series 31 and Series 66 exams. He is licensed to sell securities and to offer investment advice for a fee in Maryland. He also holds a Maryland Life and Health insurance license.
Read More
Articles

Articles

Our collection of articles on investing strategy and market insights. The articles were written by advisors on our team.
Read More
FINRA'S BrokerCheck

FINRA'S BrokerCheck

Check the background of this investment professional on FINRA's BrokerCheck
Read More

Newsletter #53 (10-07-2024)

Human Nature has been on my mind lately because I’m in the middle of an Audible book,  The Laws of Human Nature, by Robert Greene.  I can’t enthusiastically recommend it—it is an unusual book and unusually long (over 28 hours), and the paperback is 624 pages.  It is, nonetheless, an interesting take on the laws of human nature that, whether we know it or not, shape most of our actions.

My main objection to Mr. Greene’s book is his overly pessimistic interpretation of the motivations or interpretations of human behavior.  I believe he writes through the lens of someone who does not believe noble causes, intentions, or good deeds ever exist altruistically.  I don’t think Mr. Greene could accept a simple “good morning” without attributing the salutation to a devious, power-hungry human’s attempt to lower your defenses so as to rule over you.  His book can sometimes be very dark—Machiavelli would be proud.  But, thanks to my father’s influence, I had to finish the thing since I had paid “good money” for the book.

But this is a financial newsletter, not a book review.  So, let me move on to how human nature affects our financial planning and investing. Read More

Newsletter #52 (07/02/2024)

The first six months of 2024 have been very good to investors.  Of course, it is just six months, and anything under the sun can happen in the next six months.  Short-term movements in the market are unforeseeable.  The only thing we have confidence in is that if we invest in a wide swath of good companies, they will reward us in the long run.  We measure the long run in years—preferably five to ten-year increments.

Daily, we hear about how the markets are doing and what this or that event will do for the markets. Read More

Newsletter #51 (04/22/24)

If there was any doubt about this being an election year, turn on your favorite television show and sit through the election year commercials.  They make my daily Jeopardy escape a chore.  The person who invented the mute button should have received a Nobel Peace Prize.

From what I can tell (w/o the volume) political commercials haven’t changed much.  This cycle, again, I see that Social Security (SS) is a hot-button political issue in 2024.  And why not?  In the program’s history, more people are getting SS payments or getting ready to take their SS than ever before.

As of March 2024, there are over 67.5 million beneficiaries on Social Security, and they collect over $119,837,000,000 per month[i].  Almost $120 billion per month!  Or $1.440 Trillion per year.  More than Mexico’s entire annual GDP, which, incidentally, is the 14th highest in the world at $1.414 trillion.[ii]  That’s a lot of money and a lot of votes. Read More

Newsletter #50 (01/08/24)

It’s been a couple of months since the last newsletter (September 2023), and I apologize.  The end of the year is one of our busiest times, both at the office and at home.  And, if I had to pick my two least favorite months of the calendar, it would be, without a doubt, November and December.  Lucky for us, the markets in 2023 thought otherwise. Read More

Newsletter #49 (09/06/23)

As we enter the last four months of 2023, I’m reminded that this time last year was not so pleasant.  September 6, 2022, the S&P closed at 3,908 on its way south to the low of the year on October 12 of 3,577.  We were fielding a few worried calls.  What made matters worse was that the asset class in our portfolios, which is designed to be the ballast, Fixed Income Bonds, also had their worst year in decades.  (Bond prices and rising interest rates are inversely correlated.)

But markets like 2022 are where real money is made.  Market downturns like CY2022 are opportunities to buy the best companies in the world (even in the history of the world) at significant discounts.  And the icing on top of those share-price discounts, the company dividends were increasing—up about 11% in 2022.  In most of our accounts, we’re reinvesting them.  So we buy or hold companies selling at a discount, reinvest our dividends into more shares of those companies, and voila, we have a great year in 2023Read More

Newsletter #48 (07/13/23)

If you’ve been a good saver and a salaried worker throughout your life, you more than likely have an IRA, 401k, TSP, or 457.  (These are called qualified plans.)  Many people have a combination of them and perhaps multiple accounts at different places.  And if you’re approaching retirement, you should have some pretty high balances.  These accounts were built by saving pre-tax money from your paycheck or business earnings.

Pre-tax money means you postponed paying income tax on the money that went into those accounts.  This is a great way to save on income taxes while working, at the same time stashing some income for retirement.  The US has a “progressive income tax,” meaning that the more income you earn, the higher the tax rate you pay (from 10% to 37%).  Deferring part of that earned money from the highest tax brackets makes perfect sense. Read More

Newsletter #47 (06/14/23)

The first six months are nearly in for 2023, and the markets are starting well.  Markets try to price in the economy six months ahead of time.  Many analysts are assuming a recession this year, which was probably priced in at the beginning of the year.  It’s what investors think will happen after that recession that’s being priced in now.  A popular Wall Street maxim is that Bull markets (rising markets) climb a wall of worry.  It seems that’s happening now—but we’ll see.

On the local level, we have been alerted that Pershing is raising the costs of mailing paper statements.  It’s already high—as in $1.25 per statement—but it’s going to $2 after August 31 and $3 after January 2024, then $5 by June 2024.  There is nothing I hate more than paying for a statement.  This annoyance is Pershing’s deal—they want to be “paper-free by 2023.” I guess they’re trying to be green.  I think they’re trying to add $5 (in green) to their bottom line.  (I ordered a 55-pound window a Read More

Newsletter #46 (05/04/23)

Welcome to May, when stockbrokers sell and go away.  This old saying is not as relevant today as a few decades ago when floor traders on Wall Street would vacation for the month in the Hamptons.  I imagine eleven straight months of screaming and shouting (bids and asks) at each other would take its toll.

Historically, May is not a big month on the markets.  Courtesy of Moneychimp.com, here are the S&P 500 monthly averages from 1960 to 2022: Read More

Newsletter #45 (3-17-23)

Last week an economist said something to the effect that inflation is cancer and higher interest rates are chemotherapy.  Higher interest rates are not good, but inflation is much worse, and it must be kept under control.  Inflation is a serious threat to any economy.  And controlling it is under the purview of our government–it is, perhaps, one of the primary and most crucial roles of our government—to protect private property rights.  The question arises, though, why do we have inflation?

Well, it’s not like we haven’t seen this movie before—and as a country, we have understood it very well.  As long ago as 1970, Milton Friedman (1912 – 2006), an American Economist—a Nobel prize-winning economist no less said, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.” Too much money, too little output.  Or simply, too much money chasing too few goods. Read More

Newsletter #44 (12-30-22)

We can probably all agree that 2022, financially, was not the year we had hoped for–especially after opening your last statement.  The year before (2021) was fantastic, and in January, we looked on with confidence that the new year might not turn out as incredible as 2021, but that it would follow up with some pretty good returns.  Many “financial experts” predicted a positive 10% or so return in 2022.

Well, in the end, it wasn’t even close.  Nothing grows to the sky, and nothing in the market rides up a straight line.  That we consistently believe that this year will be like the last is called recency bias.  It is a cognitive bias in our thinking that favors recent events over historical ones.  It is a natural survival instinct.  (Our pre-historic ancestors did not have the luxury of studying history—they survived by living in the moment.  They didn’t have to worry about paying for retirement either.) Read More

Call Now Button