In spite of all the political bickering (and not just here in the US), 2017 was a great market for stock investors. What was really remarkable was the forward motion with such little volatility. Among the major stock indices, most charts for the year looked like a 45-degree angle higher, without so much as even… Read More

On Friday, President Trump executed a tax reform bill that will have broad implications for individual and business tax planning. Here are a few of the best articles and summaries we’ve read so far. Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Summary Provided by Lopata, Flegel & Company A comprehensive overview of the new law with additional… Read More

This fall my wife and I sent our youngest daughter off to college. We went through the same process with her older sister two years ago, so we knew the drill. Or at least we thought we did. We dutifully checked off the items on the “must-have” list provided by her university and the countless items… Read More

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last twenty years, you’ve heard of one of the seminal business books of our time, Good to Great. In this book, Jim Collins and his colleagues seek to answer why some businesses become great companies and why others don’t. What is it that makes these companies better than their… Read More

Day after day, the stock market continues to march higher, and this has some people confused. Many pundits have been looking for a correction (a drop of 10% or more) or at least a pullback (a drop of 5% or more) of some sort for quite a while. And it has been quite a while!… Read More