We hope our note finds you doing well. We wanted to follow up with you after our last letter regarding the coronavirus outbreak.

We know this is a nerve-wracking and unsettling time as an investor, but first and foremost we are reaching out to share new guidelines for our business that will protect your health and our team's health.

As we get further into tax season, ‘tis the season for financial scammers to work in earnest! Financial scams have become much more sophisticated over the past few years – gone are the days of the Nigerian prince spam email. As a result, we want to reach out with details of common scam attempts, so that you can feel confident as you go about your daily life.

We’ve been getting a lot of questions from clients regarding the impact of coronavirus’s spread on the stock markets, and wanted to reach out and provide our take on the situation.

2019 once again brought some changes to PERS, many of which we covered in our previous update. However, PERS now has a page on their website that has further information on Senate Bill 1049, which went in to effect on January 1st of 2020.

We hope you have had a great holiday season and are looking forward to spring as much as we are. The end of the year has flown by and brought many changes to your options for retirement savings, college funding, required minimum distributions, and even some tweaks to potential estate planning.

We hope our note finds you and your families doing well. We can’t believe it is already October and time to put up Halloween decorations. For our Portland-area clients, the Portland Nursery’s annual Apple Tasting continues over the weekend of the 18th-20th, with samples of over 50 apple and pear varieties, cider tasting for adults, and face painting for kids. The Oregon Zoo’s “Squishing of the Squash” is coming up as well, on October 18th, and Tualatin’s Pumpkin Regatta will occur on Saturday the 19th as brave and foolhardy contestants try to row themselves across the Lake of the Commons in giant pumpkins.

We have discussed growing market uncertainty in our recent newsletters. The tumult can be traced to various underlying political and economic influences, including Brexit, an inverted yield curve, tensions with Iran, and a contested Presidential election year approaching. However, the most common question we have gotten from clients is, “How likely are we to see a recession soon?”

We wanted to reach out to our PERS employees to run through the major changes that Senate Bill 1049, which was signed by Governor Brown yesterday, will impose upon the PERS retirement system. Depending on your particular situation, these three major changes may impact your retirement benefits.

What a difference a quarter makes. The 4th quarter of 2018 was full of uncertainty and volatility. The markets were concerned with the potential for an inverted yield curve, Brexit issues, the Fed raising interest rates, Chinese Tariff’s, and a potential Government shutdown to name a few. The 1st quarter of 2019 has alleviated a lot of these fears, at least in the short term, and is another great lesson that when we have a well-diversified portfolio that is built for your long-term plan that we shouldn’t panic.

We hope our letter finds you and your families doing well and enjoying the holidays.

To say that the past couple months have been volatile would be an understatement. 2017 was characterized by abnormally low volatility and outsized returns, but we have been through two stock market corrections so far in 2018: one in February, and the one we are currently experiencing.

We hope our letter finds you and your families doing well. We want to thank you again for all of the well wishes during our transition period. We were so pleased to see many of you at our open house, and after a full month in the new space, we are feeling fully settled into our office.