(New York)

According to both Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, last week’s retail-driven chaos was nothing…Read the full story here on our partner Magnifi’s site.

(New York)

If you were to design a tailwind for the robotics sector, what would it look like. Perhaps a pandemic…Read the full story here on our partner Magnifi’s site.

(New York)

Thematic ETFs have been one of the market’s bright spots over the last couple of years. For evidence of this…Read the full story here on our partner Magnifi’s site.

(New York)

A few weeks ago we ran a story about Apple planning for its own-branded car. At the time, most analysts thought Apple would wait until self-driving cars became a mainstream reality before doing so—which made it seem like it would be 5 years or so. Well, in what comes as a major announcement, Apple is close to finalizing a deal with Kia to produce a branded Apple car for them in the US. Morgan Stanley analyst Katie Huberty explained why this is so exciting in just four short sentences: “Smartphones are a $500bn annual TAM. Apple has about one-third of this market. The mobility market is $10 trillion. So Apple would only need a 2% share of this market to be the size of their iPhone business”.

FINSUM: Apple is not only the world’s biggest player in smart phones, but it has a fiercely loyal follower base. It is hard to imagine the company would not get to 2% market share in mobility within 3 years at the most. This is the kind of announcement that could propel Apple on a big run for the next few years.

(New York)

Most investors don’t fully understand the differences and benefits between fixed annuities, variable annuities, and fixed index annuities, so it is only natural that most clients would not even begin to understand deferred annuities and their benefits. Deferred annuities work just like other types of annuities except they explicitly defer any payouts for a set number of years. It is essentially a lump sum that gets invested, with no planned withdrawals for, say, 20 years. In many ways that makes them like an IRA. These can be very useful for clients who have are conservative in their outlook, have a nest egg to buy an annuity, and don’t need income right away.

FINSUM: In our view this is a perfect product for Millennials and Gen X who are 15 years or more from retirement. It is like a self-funded IRA and completely fits with Millennials’ bearish view of markets and the economy. It may also be a good choice for clients who tend to overspend, as this can do a good job protecting them from themselves.