To our clients and friends:

Happy New Year to all of you! At the end of each quarter, we publish a short letter which tries to recap and shed light on events that occurred in the financial markets during that quarter. We like to send this newsletter as an educational feature to our clients, as well as our friends and colleagues. We hope you’ll enjoy this quarter’s summary. We look forward to seeing each one of you in 2012.

To our clients and friends:

Greetings—and happy fall! Following the end of each quarter, we send our clients a newsletter which summarizes the events that took place in the financial markets and in the economy during the quarter. We also send the newsletter to friends and colleagues. We’ve received many favorable reviews since we first began publishing the newsletter in 2009.

To our clients and friends:

At the end of each quarter, I send clients a letter summarizing events of the past three months. Given the ongoing civil unrest and economic uncertainties in Europe relating to debt obligations and future prospects for growth, many clients are looking to their advisors for direction on what they should do.

As I stated in my last newsletter, investors have become more uncertain of whether they should do anything in response to world events such as occurred earlier this year with the earthquake in Japan and the overthrowing of regimes in North Africa.

To our clients and friends:

At the end of each quarter, I send clients a letter summarizing events of the past three months. Given recent events in Japan and North Africa, many investors have become more uncertain of whether they should do anything in response to these events.

Clients are looking to their advisors for direction and for a sense of perspective. The media cannot be relied upon to provide assurances. Instead, there is a crisis mentality that saturates the daily newscasts and print media.

To our clients and friends:

For the past 12 months, my letters have been designed to balance some of the extreme pessimism among many investors with an objective, positive outlook – this 2010 year-end letter continues with that goal in mind.

To our clients and friends:

This third quarter newsletter will present a slightly more positive theme than we’ve been accustomed to of late. My objective here will be to share some thoughts on what I consider to be today’s slowly improving economic and stock market outlook. We will try and look beyond the media headlines (as we always do) and to give our readers a sense of where we may be headed in the investment world.

To our clients and friends:

Following 2008’s sharp downturn and then last year’s strong recovery in stock markets around the globe, many investors had hoped for a return to relative normalcy and stability in 2010. And certainly the year started on a positive note as stocks turned in one of the strongest first quarter increases on record.

To our clients and friends:

After the volatile roller coaster ride of 2008 and 2009, the financial markets have been relatively quiet and blessedly uneventful by comparison thus far in 2010. The S & P 500 index gained slightly less than 5% in the first quarter, which represents the best start to any year since 1998. Despite the positive results thus far in 2010, it seems that a cloud of uncertainty has shrouded these gains and many investors worldwide remain very nervous about the future.

To our clients and friends:

As I write this letter, we are two weeks from the end of the first decade in the history of the U.S. stock market which will result in a negative overall return to equity investors. This unenviable statistic is a grim reminder to investors aged 25 to 85 of the historic nature of the difficulties faced in world capital markets over these past ten years.

To our clients and friends:

As I write this letter, it is two weeks from the end of the third quarter in what continues to be a most eventful year for stock markets and the economy.

It’s also been one year since the weekend that shook the foundations of Wall Street and of the global financial system – when Lehman Brothers collapsed, Merrill Lynch vanished as an independent entity and AIG was taken over by the U.S. government.

In light of the anniversary of these historic events, I thought it might be worthwhile to briefly summarize where we’ve been this year, where we are today and the prospects for the period ahead – and also to highlight some lessons from last year’s financial collapse.