Custom Structured Investments: How to Combat the Devil in the Details

By: Dominick Paoloni, CIMA®   The popularity of structured investing is slowly moving its way through the financial community mainstream. Structured investing is a sophisticated technique that allows investors to reduce or eliminate the downside market risk, or leverage the returns, of the underlying asset class. By blending structured investments into a portfolio mix that may include traditional ETFs, or mutual funds, advisors can provide a suitable risk versus reward…

Protecting Your Portfolio: Is it Time to Change Your Ways?

By: Dominick Paoloni, CIMA® Managing money is extremely difficult and ever changing. According to AARP, the two greatest concerns of their members are outliving their income and not having enough savings to retire. During the last twelve years the capital markets have exacerbated this problem with volatile stock markets and crashing real estate values. Good money managers lost less, which gives little solace to the investors whose main concern is…

Index Annuities vs Structured Products

Dominick Paoloni, CIMA® CIO & Founder Portfolio Manager, IPSAX Adjunct Professor, University of Denver & University of Colorado Over the years I have written many articles on the good, the bad, and the ugly of annuities. As I always point out, there are many kinds of annuities, and the terms can vary widely depending on the individual contract. In the mid-1990’s IPS Strategic Capital was one of the first financial…

Time to Get Real With Real Estate

By: Dominick Paoloni, CIMA®   The majority of US consumers list their home as their largest asset. According to The Financial Times, mortgages average approximately 50% of total home value. The average US home value has dropped 30% since 2008, wiping out approximately $9 trillion of equity (Zillow.com). Because of the leverage a mortgage affords, this means that the average homeowner equity has declined over 60%. The problem is, the…

Should You Stay the Course Through This Down Market?

Can past market cycles help us with future investment decisions? The year is 1966: the Baltimore Orioles just won the World Series, the Houston Astro-Dome makes its debut, Star Trek airs its first season, and the stock market has been in a sixteen-year up trend. The American Dream is in full swing. Who would have predicted 1966 would mark the beginning of a sixteen-year slide in the market that would…

Heading to Shore

By: Illana Polyak, Morningstar Advisor At least once a year, Dominick Paoloni flies to the British Virgin Islands, rents a 50-foot catamaran for a week, and sails the Caribbean Sea. The trips, which tend to coincide with favorable winds, take him to one or two islands a day. The rest of the time is spent watching the sailboat slice through still, glassy waters. On a few occasions, the seas have…

Changing The Way You Invest- Managing Risk, Not Predicting Return

By: Dominick Paoloni, CIMA®   With the market dropping over 400 points on Friday, June 6th on the back of increasing unemployment numbers and an increasing possibility of recession, the average investor is looking for answers about what to do. All the financial pundits on television and the print media are giving opinions from selling one asset class, like financials and manufacturing, to buying another asset class, like technology and…