Marc Ruiz

My very first clients have long ago retired to Naples, Florida. They are kind and adventurous and after 24 years together I consider them the dearest of friends. During Hurricane Irma the lanai pulled off their home in the wind, tearing off the rear...

The International Monetary Fund, or IMF, conducted its 2018 spring meeting in Washington, D.C. last week. The meeting was accompanied by some high profile interviews with IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde. The purpose of the IMF is to promote...

The game wasn’t going my way. Although I didn’t really have a dog in this fight, I typically root for our Big Ten cousins in national games, and the Wolverines had lost all momentum early in the second half. So I was already a bit perturbed when...

As the world’s largest debtor, without doubt the biggest beneficiary of the low interest rate environment of the past 10 or so years has been the U.S. federal government. According to the November 2017 Government Accountability Office Financial...

Here we go again. Investors had clearly been lulled into complacency by the seemingly unidirectional US stock market. And how can we blame them? It had been over 550 trading days since the S&P 500 index had experienced a daily decline of 5...

As I wrote a few months ago, I was a bit underwhelmed by the tax reform legislation passed last year. On the personal income tax side of the law, while I liked the expansion of the standard deduction, the retention of seven progressive income...

I like craft beer. As anyone who is either a beer geek, or even worse has a beer geek in their life, knows, part of the beer geek experience is dealing with scarcity. There always seems to be a recently released, hard to find beer which is just...

There’s been some high profile financial press lately proclaiming “The Bull Market in Bonds is Over." Most investment strategists I follow regularly postulate that bonds, U.S. bonds in particular, have been in a bull market trend since for a...

Twas the Thursday before Christmas and I was finally able to schedule one of the more gratifying new client meetings of my career. After dropping my new grandpuppy (her name is Molly) off at the house, my newlywed Millennial daughter and her husband...

As most readers know, in my “day job” at Oak Partners I serve individuals and families by helping them with their financial planning and decision making and by building and managing their investment portfolios taking into account their needs and...