Our son gave my wife the book Being Mortal for Mother’s Day. The author, Dr. Atul Gawande, is a surgeon in Boston, on the faculty at Harvard, and known for his best selling book The Checklist Manifesto. Whether you are caring for aging relatives or managing your own affairs as you reach your later years, I think it provides valuable insight on aging and death. It will force you to think about things most of us would rather not.

My personal takeaways were:

1. Stay in your home as long as possible.
2. Talk to multiple doctors to get more than one perspective on end-of-life health issues.
3. Talk to your children about what’s important to you and give them direction on what they can do.

I encourage you to pick up a copy and share your insights with your children.

1. A short video on the market’s response to Greece. Click here.
2. Did you like the Brad Pitt movie, Moneyball? Here’s the origin story of AVM Systems, the little-known company that jump-started sabermetrics and made Moneyball possible. Click here.
3. A great piece from The New York Times on the complicated world of investing. Click here.
4. A summary from DFA on the state of the mutual fund landscape. Click here.
5. DFA’s video detailing their fund construction and trading practices. Click here.

One of the first places to seek transparency with investing is in the kind of relationship your advisor or broker has with you. There are two distinct standards of care that divide our industry:

• Suitability, which means your broker can sell you anything that they think is a reasonable fit for your situation, and
• Fiduciary, which indicates a relationship where your interests are placed above those of the advisor.

For a brief, entertaining look at the difference, watch this video: Butchers vs. Dietitians.

A recent editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch discusses the topic, and highlights the conflicts of interest present not only for the advisors, but also for the politicians debating calls to impose the fiduciary standard on traditional brokers. To quote this editorial, “It would put some financial services advisers out of business. That’s OK. In fact, it’s good. The ones it puts out of business should go away and the ones that remain should be those who want to put their clients’ needs and desires above their own.”

At Hill Investment Group we believe all financial advisors should be held to a fiduciary standard and think the proposed changes are good news for investors.