They are telling us that, after months of horrendous news, hints of a return to economic stability created sustained euphoria during last week’s market run-up. The word sustained is used loosely here…it means more than one day. Some large and previously battered financial companies, namely Citibank, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase reported that were profitable during the first two months of the year. And, investors all over the globe, who are still licking their wounds after being pummeled by the same market that ruthlessly hacked their personal wealth, now want to quickly make up their losses by getting back on the same airplane that essentially crashed in stormy weather.
Author Archive for JS Wolff
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These days as I slog through my daily Wall Street Journal, by the time I get to the lone cartoon buried somewhere in the back of the paper, I feel like I have been mauled by dozens of bears. What’s scary is that I am now almost numb to the pain because the daily mauling has been going on for well over a year. The Wall Street whispers of, “stay the course” and “invest for the long term” are ingrained in my thinking but it’s hard not to feel that what is going on now is different than the downturns of the past.
In all my years of being hanging around with professionals that consider themselves to be financial experts, I’ve never found anyone who could provide a logical explanation for how and why markets move in one direction or another? But it seems that either a general climate of confidence or fear are certainly leading indicators.
For example, it is interesting that the markets pay close attention to a concept that is anything but logical or analytical. It’s called “consumer confidence.” Webster’s dictionary tells us that confidence is “a state of confident hopefulness that events will be favorable.”
We all have a pretty good idea about what it means to be physically and mentally well. While we may not be perfect physical specimens, aside from the typical periodic aches and pains, everything is working reasonably well and we are able to handle even the unpredictable events that each day brings. For some, being financially well could mean doing lunch with Warren Buffet on the Learjet next week. For the rest of us Financial Wellness could very simply mean…that we are prepared. And when you think about it, most personal money diseases occur because, for whatever reason, we are not.
The core of GuideSpark’s Financial Wellness Center is our new online learning service. Over the past few years we’ve experienced an explosion of new web technologies and services that have changed how online users interact and learn on the web. The GuideSpark solution leverages many of these latest trends of the consumer web to create a new learning solution designed for corporations and organizations. Our solution creates a high impact, rich media experience designed especially for today’s web information user. We hope our solution starts a new trend in corporate learning experiences.
Over the past 10 months we’ve been hard at work building out our new online learning service, so it’s great to publicly launch our new offering – a corporate solution for financial education and wellness. When we started the company earlier this year we didn’t realize how bad the economic situation would get, but our solution definitely comes at a time when financial issues and worries are top of mind for most US workers. We hope our solution provides people with the information and tools to put themselves on a solid financial path.
