In our annual economic Investment Outlook, we predicted that interest rates would rise but not enough to derail the expansion. At the same time, we anticipated that the conflicting signals of robust earnings growth and above-average valuation would settle somewhere in the middle.

According to Einstein, what’s the hardest thing to understand in the world? Josh Frankel, CFP, helps find relativity between taxpayers and wealth planning, particularly charitable-giving strategies.

One of the four takeaways in our 2018 Outlook was, “It’s the Economy,” meaning that over the long term, financial markets tend to do a good job shrugging off headline risk and political drama. Instead, markets focus on the health of the economy. This attribute was once again demonstrated this week with equity markets gaining more than 2 percent despite heightened geopolitical tension as the U.S. formally exited the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.