Enjoy the current installment of “Weekend Reading For Financial Planners” – this week’s edition kicks off with the news that Congressional Republicans, who recently voted to set a $4.5 trillion target cost for their planned tax bill to replace the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), are currently debating whether the “baseline” for that cost should be the current law where TCJA’s provisions will expire in 2026, or if it should assume that TCJA doesn’t expire – the answer to which will largely dictate whether the next bill will ‘just’ extend TCJA (with few additional tax cuts), or whether it could go even further to include tax-free treatment of tips, an increase in the state and local tax deduction limitation, or even a repeal of the estate tax (among many other potential Republican tax priorities).
Also in industry news this week:
- A recent survey by Citywire found that one of advisors’ biggest perceived threats to the industry is the potential for private equity ownership of RIAs to degrade the quality of service provided by advisory firms
- The Corporate Transparency Act, which just last week had appeared to be back in effect, is now effectively on hold again after the Treasury Department announced it will not be enforcing the law’s Beneficial Ownership Information (BOI) reporting requirements
From there, we have several articles on AI productivity tools:
- How advisors can craft a good prompt for creating effective written content using AI tools like ChatGPT
- AI research tools can be an improvement on finding information via a Google search, though with the constantly shifting technology landscape it might be necessary to re-evaluate how they compare with one another on a regular basis
- Why AI tools that automate many of the manual tasks currently done by younger advisors can free up more time for those advisors to learn the skills that will help them advance in their careers
We also have a number of articles on investing:
- The growth of the biggest handful of U.S. stocks has outpaced the rest of the market by so much that the number of companies categorized as “large cap” has shrunk from nearly 500 to only around 150 over the last 15 years
- Amid fears that U.S. stocks are in a speculative bubble owing to their high price-to-earnings ratios, an analysis shows that a reversion to historical averages would result in U.S. equities underperforming international stocks over the next 10 years
- Why today’s high U.S. stock prices (as measured by the Shiller CAPE ratio) could be less about U.S. companies being overvalued and more about them simply having better growth prospects today than they did throughout the 20th century
We wrap up with three final articles, all about health and energy:
- Why taking regular naps can improve peoples’ energy and productivity levels (although the effects aren’t always the same for different people)
- How humans’ origins as hunter-gatherers, and our evolutionary preference to conserve energy, can explain why it’s so hard to exercise solely for its own sake
- With Daylight Savings Time starting again this weekend, people can reduce the impact of shifting forward one hour by making more gradual changes to their own schedules
Enjoy the ‘light’ reading!
