Work Six Days, Get Paid for Five?

In some settings a shorter workweek –“work four days, get paid for five” –  draws kudos. Not on Wall Street, where Goldman Sachs and others cherish a tradition of long workdays and only Sundays off.

Mary Callahan Erdoes, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase's Asset and Wealth Management division, sees a workweek of six 12-hour days as an aid to speed-learning. New wealth managers, she estimates, can master their trade almost twice as fast as they could with a forty-hour workweek. 

Erdoes probably doesn’t mean to be hard on young Wall Streeters; according to this interview, she herself used to work Sundays as well. 

What do you think? Is she overestimating the ability of young analysts to soak up knowledge at 7 p.m. on Saturday night?

Which Kind of Trust Do You Drive?

Steve Parrish, as quoted in a Kiplinger primer on trusts:

 A revocable trust is like the minivan of estate planning. They are multipurpose and used more by the upper-middle class. An irrevocable trust is like a high-performance sports car. 

 As for me . . .

Old School Investing Ain’t Dead Yet

Passive investing rules. Mutual funds have become musty relics. Right? 

Not yet. Not by a long shot.

Index funds tracking the S&P 500 have grown at warp speed. By the end of 2020 they held assets totaling $5.4 trillion. Yet significantly more, over $8 trillion, is invested in actively-managed funds benchmarked to the S&P 500. Investor hopes spring eternal.

As for old-fashioned mutual funds, the WSJ reports  fund assets total some $21 trillion, far exceeding the $6.2 trillion in ETFs.  

In time the old order will indeed give way to the new. Already, early adopters are bypassing ETFs and turning to non-fungible tokens and cryptocurrencies. Reminder: if clients want to wager on crypto, make sure they consult their astrologer.