Quarterly Newsletters

The Armbruster Capital Management News & Education section of our website incorporates articles, vidcasts, and newsletters specifically geared towards issues that our clients are facing today.

ACM Journal - Investment Management
17 Apr

Chris’s Corner: – Cash Management

For the past several years, it has been impossible to get any sort of return on cash balances. The Fed Funds rate was literally zero for a while, and banks, money market funds, and CDs all paid close to zero percent interest on cash balances. You could leave money in your bank account because there wasn’t much opportunity cost.

However, that has changed over the past year as the Fed has aggressively raised short-term interest rates.

ACM Journal - Investment Management
17 Apr

Are Stocks Too Expensive? – Q1 2023 Newsletter

If the overall stock market falls from here, which we consider fairly likely, value and international stocks will probably also decline. However, their low valuations should help insulate them from severe declines, and we expect that they will outperform growth-oriented stocks. So, today may not be the day they ring the bell to signal the market bottom, but for certain market sectors, this will likely be an attractive buying opportunity when we look back from a decade in the future.

ACM Journal - Investment Management
13 Jan

Firm News – Q4 2022 Newsletter

Last year may not have been so great for the stock market, but it was a solid year for our firm. We were gratified to see our performance remain fairly strong, at least relative to the overall stock and bond markets. This was thanks largely to our data-driven approach that led us to value stocks, conservative bonds, and alternative investments, all of which performed admirably.

As most of you know, we tend toward the technical side of the investment business and aren’t so great at prospecting for new clients and selling. That results in slower growth and likely reduced revenue for our firm, but we’re quite happy focusing more on delivering a solid service than being an advisor to the masses. Even with moderate growth last year, we still finished up with around $700 million in client assets entrusted to us. We started out fourteen years ago as a very small firm and are now solidly mid-sized. I doubt we’ll ever be a behemoth, even in our local market, but we expect to continue to grow in measured fashion over the years.

ACM Journal - Investment Management
13 Jan

Chris’s Corner – Q4 2022 Newsletter

Nancy Pelosi famously said we needed to pass Obamacare legislation so we could find out what is in the bill. Well, the SECURE Act 2.0 has now been passed, but there are still a lot of details that need to be fleshed out, likely by the Treasury Department in the coming years. Here’s what we know so far:

The SECURE Act 2.0 was approved by Congress and signed by President Biden in late December 2022 and is now officially law as of January 1, 2023. It is an extension of the SECURE Act of 2019 which was intended to help strengthen the retirement system and ensure participants’ financial readiness for retirement…

ACM Journal - Investment Management
13 Oct

Diversification Still Works

Over the past almost 15 years, diversification was a fool’s errand. Simply buying the largest, techiest, US-based stocks would have yielded the largest rewards. Why bother with small-cap stocks, international diversification, or Warren Buffett’s precious value stocks (what does that old coot know anyway)? FAANG stocks were all that were necessary to earn market-beating returns.