What is a CFP®?

A CFP®, or Certified Financial Planner™ identifies those individuals who have met rigorous professional standards and have agreed to adhere to the principles of integrity, objectivity, competence, fairness, confidentiality, professionalism and diligence when dealing with clients. In order to receive this designation, an individual must meet the education, examination, experience, and ethics standards established by the Certified Financial Planners Board of Standards (CFP® Board). Therefore, a financial planner who has earned the CFP® marks should be distinguished from a financial planner who has not. There is nothing preventing a person from declaring him or herself a “Financial Planner”, and it is therefore incumbent upon the consumer to differentiate between a planner who has earned the marks and one who hasn’t. (Read more…)

Can future returns be accurately projected?

In my almost 30 years of investment experience coupled with accounting and finance degrees and two professional certificates from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania there was not much discussion on stock market return projections. I find this odd since Modern Portfolio Theory requires an estimate of return for each asset class in order to develop a portfolio. In my education there was a great deal of emphasis placed on determining a security’s relative attractiveness. Was it cheap or expensive? There was little emphasis about taking the valuation to a projected return. For example, during Greenspan’s chairmanship he used a capitalization of earnings to determine the market’s valuation…. Read more »