For investors who value the stability of precious metals, the idea of holding physical gold or silver in an IRA can be enticing. Companies like GoldPro and Birch Gold Group have built entire businesses around facilitating this, promising to help you secure your retirement with tangible assets that have stood the test of time. But what many investors don’t realize is the steep price of this privilege: these companies often charge significant fees that can quietly erode returns, making the allure of physical gold in your IRA far more costly than it seems.

Investing in gold and other precious metals has a longstanding allure. The idea of holding tangible, timeless assets that have been valuable for millennia feels both safe and prestigious. But in reality, the appeal of gold and precious metals can often be more about perception than performance.

You only live once! Social media investors have banded together on unconventional platforms to drive up the prices of a handful of “meme stocks,” seemingly without traditional evaluation of investing risks and rewards. They made headlines with their “short squeeze” of GameStop (GME), and, as they garner media attention, their tactics continue. While it’s not the intended victim of the YOLO traders, will the efficient market hypothesis be a casualty of these events? The answer depends a lot on your definition of efficient markets. Perhaps long-term investors would be better served questioning the potential impact on their investment philosophy.

Riskalyze quantifies the semantics of the financial advice industry, replacing confusing and subjective terms like “moderately conservative” and “moderately aggressive” with the Risk Number®, a number between 1 and 99 that pinpoints a client’s exact comfort zone for downside risk and potential upside gain with a 95% Probability Range. Advisors then build an investment portfolio to match the client’s Risk Number and chart a clearly defined path to achieving the client’s goals.

By design, elections have clear winners and losers. But the real winners were investors who avoided the temptation to base their decisions around election results and stayed invested for the long haul.

While we’ve faced several health, social, and economic crises this year, July Fourth is a good time to think about how lucky we are to live in this great country and to remember the resilience and perseverance we’ve demonstrated over the past 244 years. History has shown us that better times will come.

As we look ahead to the summer months, we can’t help but think what a challenging year it’s been so far. At the same time, we’re encouraged by the resiliency and accelerated innovation among US businesses and the efforts by our national, state, and local governments to support our communities. And we continue to be amazed by the unparalleled dedication and cooperation among our front-line healthcare professionals and medical researchers to see us through to the other side of this health crisis…

“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

The economic struggles in our country are among the worst we’ve ever seen. In April, a record 20 million people lost their jobs, and 36 million people have filed for unemployment since the COVID-19 pandemic struck in mid-March. Record drops in consumer confidence, manufacturing, and spending are all adding to the immediate economic fallout. Specific industries have been devastated, with names like J.C. Penney, J.Crew, and Neiman Marcus filing for bankruptcy…

Investors like labels for the economy and financial markets—many of them with the word “great” in them. The Great Depression. The Great Recession. The Great Lockdown. Well, we’ve moved into what we might call the Great Disconnect. How can stocks have rebounded so strongly in the last month amid so much suffering and economic damage? What’s Wall Street seeing that so many on Main Street are not?

As the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic continues, how we respond to it will determine how we beat it. Continued sacrifices range from everyone in the medical community working on the front lines to the thousands of truck drivers across our country keeping goods flowing, parents who have become homeschoolers, and folks missing their family events to help stop the spread of this terrible outbreak. As Lou Holtz said, we can’t control what happens, but how we respond to it is what matters. Our response to this crisis has shown the resolve and strength of the human spirit, which is why we will overcome.