Look at GOP Candidates; Markowitz Defends MPT; 10 Team Building Mistakes: August Research—Slideshow

In August’s Research cover story (“Does Anyone Have a Real Economic Plan?”), financial analyst and author Nicole Gelinas laments the absence of meaningful debate on the one key issue in today’s economy: the houses of debt Americans are living in. She proposes a possible solution, but warns that failure to address the problem will cast a long pall on the economy.

Global Economy columnist Alexei Bayer calls for a balanced-budget amendment along with tax hikes sufficient to fund our current spending as a means of bringing voters to the polls to once and for all make choices about the size and scope of government we have.

Looking at advisors’ practices, this issue has Bill Good’s rendition of the top 10 biggest mistakes advisors make in building teams –based on his decades-long experience with some 5,000 teams. And we speak with Nancy Duarte, a leading practitioner in the field of storyselling sharing tips with advisors on how to emotionally connect with clients and prospects.

Click through the following slides to preview other content in the August issue of Research.

Does Anyone Have a Real Economic Plan?

The conventional wisdom is that Barack Obama, presiding over a sinking economy, is in a heap of trouble come the next election. Yet author and financial analyst Nicole Gelinas argues the conventional wisdom may work about as well as it has elsewhere over the past decade. Remember, home prices can never fall nationwide. The financial system can easily withstand what will be a “soft landing” in housing. After such a sudden, severe recession, job growth will be quick.

In other words, Gelinas holds the conventional wisdom may be completely unreliable — including the notion that any president who can’t deliver on the economy will be, as Obama put it a month after taking office, a “one-term proposition.” A key reason for this is the failure so far of the president’s challengers to understand why the collapse of the housing market is far more devastating than a stock market crash. Gelinas explains what kind of policy might effectively address the fact that at least a quarter of homeowners are “underwater” on their mortgages.

The Presenter as Mentor

For speaking to large groups or presenting one-on-one, there’s no more compelling way to package your message than in a story framework. Indeed, two of the most powerful presentations in history, Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, used storytelling as a structural device.

In her most recent book, Resonate: Present Visual Stories That Transform Audiences (Wiley 2010), Nancy Duarte reveals how to emotionally connect and make presentations memorable experiences by employing story techniques typically used only for screenwriting and novels.

Duarte Design, her Silicon Valley design firm, has created some 250,000 presentations for the world’s top brands. Its clients include Adobe, American Express, E*Trade, General Electric, Google, Microsoft and Wells Fargo Wealth Management, to name a few. In this interview, she shares ideas on how to build trust through storytelling with financial advisors.

Nobelist, Updated

As the father of modern portfolio theory, Dr. Harry Markowitz needs no introduction. His first published article in 1952 provided a framework for how investors could most effectively face uncertainty. Seven years later, his groundbreaking book Portfolio Selection: Efficient Diversification of Investments expanded on the relationship of risk and return — a concept ubiquitous in investing today.

But Markowitz, a Nobel laureate honored in 1990 for his pioneering work, is not resting on his laurels or indeed his laureate.