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What might your best stock holding, a piece of real estate, shares in a privately held company, interests in private equity, venture or hedge funds, fine art, collectibles, and bitcoin have in common? Whether you purchased them for love or investment purposes, they could be among the best items to give to your favorite charities to realize maximum tax benefits. Before you sell them, it's vital to understand how appreciated non-cash assets can be to a philanthropic wealth management strategy.

Wealthy individuals and family offices are increasingly looking to direct investments to enhance their returns. Other significant incentives for choosing direct investing include the elimination of management fees charged by investment firms. They can also serve as a vehicle to align investments more closely with the values and mindset of the investor. If you’re a family office contemplating a direct investment program, this article by NEPC outlines the key steps and guidelines to follow that will help set you up for success.

U.S. stocks have global exposure but do not provide global diversification. In investing, being exposed to too much of the same thing could be dangerous, especially when that market or a segment of it underperforms. A globally diversified equity portfolio may not only protect investors from the concentration risks due to home bias, but could also open the doors for them to take advantage of many lucrative opportunities abroad. And if you go global, go active.

The main threat to responsible investing (RI) is the very success of the idea itself. There are now so many investors looking for RI investments that the usual financial industry fraudsters and unethical salespeople have come out in force.

The strategies available through liquid alternatives and hedge funds can deliver valuable portfolio construction benefits for certain types of investors, with suitability depending on investor-specific objectives, preferences, and constraints. Liquid alternatives are public and private vehicles that investors use to access a variety of alternative investment strategies. In comparing and contrasting them, major hedge fund categories were mapped to liquid alternative categories, noting important differences between their structures.

Investors can diversify their portfolios through equity allocations to markets outside their home market. Despite this opportunity, investors on average have maintained allocations to their home country that have been significantly larger than the country's market-capitalization weight in a globally diversified equity index. This paper explores the potential benefits, and the factors to assess in determining portfolio allocations.

On August 9, 2019, the Nebraska Department of Banking and Finance issued the Interpretive Opinion No. 19 that excludes M&A Brokers from the Nebraska Securities Act’s definition of broker-dealer. It is a development that modernizes and streamlines Nebraska’s securities rules and regulations.

Oil prices jumped 18% at the opening of trading Sunday night after a missile attack on the world's largest crude oil processing plant in Saudi Arabia, but fell back to a gain of about 9% on Monday morning as traders attempted to handicap the impact on future production. Saudi Arabia has a stated goal of restoring one-third of lost production by the end of Monday, but the timeline to restore the remaining portion of the facility is uncertain. Estimates are in the range of several weeks to months.

When taxes don’t matter, and that is rarely the case for most investors, pre-tax returns are sufficient in determining whether the investment did well or poorly relative to a benchmark. But for taxable accounts, pre-tax returns provide an incomplete picture, and relying on them can lead to poor investment decisions. In such cases, using after-tax returns, after-tax benchmark returns, and Tax Alpha in your decision process is more relevant, and could help you to increase your wealth on an after-tax basis.

Institutional investors predict the volatility that rocked markets across the globe in the fourth quarter of 2018 will continue into 2019, and expect that the long-running U.S. bull market will soon come to an end. But even as they anticipate a dramatic 180-degree turn from the low-rate, low-volatility environment that’s fueled the longest bull market in history, more than half of the survey respondents (60%) say institutional investors are prepared to handle the risks in 2019.