Webinar Wednesdays: Investor Education on a Computer Near You

AAII hosts a live digital video event on Wednesdays where speakers from the investment education world discuss a variety of financial topics, completely free to all AAII members.

When sheltering in place started due to the coronavirus pandemic, AAII saw that it could fill a need for commonsense investing education and advice by broadcasting writers and speakers that have relevant financial information to share during this volatile market time (Figure 1).

Already, we have hosted webinars featuring AAII analysts, Sam Stovall of CFRA Research and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Jay Clayton, with many more speakers scheduled to appear.

How Do the Webinars Work?

You can register for an upcoming webinar by going to our Webinars section of AAII.com at www.aaii.com/webinars and clicking on the Register link to sign up.

Watch these digital events on your phone, tablet, personal computer or mobile device, or dial in with the access number provided to just listen in. AAII webinars are a valuable new member benefit!

The Webinars section of AAII.com also presents our most recent featured webinar, our schedule of upcoming broadcasts and an archive of past webinars. At your convenience, you can watch any digital event you may have missed, download past presentation handouts and access links to the articles, resources and other relevant content discussed during the broadcasts.

About AAII’s YouTube Channel

You can also access replays of our previous webinar broadcasts, as well as other AAII video content, on our YouTube channel.

Subscribe to us on YouTube so that you don’t miss the latest videos and updates designed to assist and educate individual investors on the current issues that impact their financial outcomes and future (Figure 2).

Participate From the Comfort of Your Own Home

One advantage to broadcasting live events on the internet is that it gives us the ability to directly interact with our members and other individual investors to answer the questions and concerns they have.

During the live webinar, you can submit questions to our moderator who will read the question aloud to the speaker for the benefit of all attendees. AAII staff are also watching the broadcast and answering questions directly.

More to Come!

In the coming weeks and months ahead, AAII will be broadcasting a new speaker and financial topic every Wednesday, with presenters that include our members’ favorite speakers plus a new stable of panelists.

We are also taking suggestions on future webinar topics—simply fill out the survey included in the post-webinar email that is sent to all registrants, or email AAII’s video and broadcast team directly at videos@aaii.com.

Making Smarter Asset Allocation Decisions With My Portfolio

Many investors face a problem that can have a significant impact on their overall portfolio performance—asset allocation. Specifically, they need an answer to the question “Am I holding the right investments in the right proportion to one another?”

You may—like other investors—own stocks, mutual funds and/or exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

Individually, buying each may have made sense at the time of purchase, but do you know how well they fit together? Is there a chance you have too much exposure to a small number of sectors while unintentionally ignoring others? What about market capitalizations? Do you have any exposure to small-cap stocks? Is it more or less exposure than you think? Does your portfolio’s allocation make sense given the type of investor you are?

What about the attractiveness of your investments? Are the stocks you hold still attractively valued? Are they still the growth-type stocks they were when you bought them? What about your mutual funds and ETFs? Are they still good investments or should you start looking at their competitors?

Doing the analysis to figure out the answers may seem daunting at first. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be.

AAII.com’s My Portfolio tool gives you the information to make the important decisions about your portfolio. At a glance, you can see whether your investments are still worth holding onto, whether you are taking on too much or too little risk and how diversified your portfolio truly is. Best of all, the data is customized for you and focused on the investments you are most interested in.

Tools for Making Informed Decisions About Your Portfolio

At the top of My Portfolio, you will see several tabs. Each provides specific information about your portfolio (Figure 3).

The Portfolio tab provides an overview of your holdings. You’ll find useful price, gain/loss, valuation and dividend data about your holdings. You can also add any personal notes, such as the reason you purchased a certain stock.

You can quickly judge the attractiveness of your investments with the Grades tab. Stocks, mutual funds and ETFs are assigned a grade of A, B, C, D or F. Just like in school, A’s and B’s are good while D’s and F’s are bad. At a glance, you can see whether your investments still warrant a spot in your portfolio based on the characteristics that matter to you most, whether it’s low valuation, strong growth or positive earnings estimate revisions.

The Diversification Analyzer in My Portfolio gives you a breakdown of how your portfolio is allocated based on the number of shares you’ve entered for each stock, mutual fund and ETF, plus any dollar amounts you’ve entered for cash and/or bond holdings. This information is used to tell you if you are being too aggressive or not aggressive enough given your chosen investing profile.

Diversification is not just limited to stocks, bonds and cash. Diversifying within asset classes can help protect you against security-specific risks. Even when you hold many different investments, you may not be as diversified as you think. This can particularly occur when you hold too many stocks from one sector or just a few sectors. You can also diversify, and even boost your returns, by purposely allocating beyond large-cap stocks. 

AAII Financial Summary

Annually, AAII publishes its year-end balance sheet for members and life members interested in the finances of the association. Prior years’ balance sheets can be found online in the Member News sections of past AAII Journals.

Local Chapters Meet Remotely to Spread Investor Education

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, all in-person AAII Local Chapter, SIG and IEG meetings have been suspended. However, many AAII chapters are operating webinars featuring the same quality speaker presentations as the live programs, streamed online and accessible from your computer or a mobile device. All members are invited to attend any webinar, no matter where they live.

The Chicago chapter invited Steve Shaw, founder & president of BondSavvy, to speak on bond investing and debunk many of the long-held investing beliefs surrounding bonds. Nearly 200 members attended Shaw’s presentation and interacted with him directly to ask bond-related questions.

The Research Triangle chapter invited AAII’s own Wayne Thorp, vice president and senior financial analyst, to discuss A+ Investor, AAII’s new investment discovery, analysis and tracking service. He walked viewers through its online tools for the evaluation of stocks, mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), as well as portfolio tracking and analysis. Members got answers to their questions about A+ Investor and the My Portfolio area of AAII.com from a person close to their design and implementation.

The San Diego chapter invited Paul Merriman and Chris Pedersen from the Merriman Financial Education Foundation to speak on target-date funds, index funds and robo-investing. Over 400 members heard the two popular speakers suggest equity asset classes investors should own and explain how to select the best mutual funds or ETFs to buy in each category.

Despite our local chapters not being able to meet in person, the investment education continues! To see a listing of all upcoming chapter webinar programs, please go to the Chapter Webinar Calendar (Figure 4). Click on the name of the speaker for the presentation details and webinar link. 

Academic Awards: Fostering Investment Education and Research

Four papers won awards for investment research from AAII in 2019. The awards are presented as part of AAII’s ongoing effort to encourage education and research in the area of investments and are given for papers that provide insight into investing.

The awards are made in conjunction with the meetings of major finance associations around the country. The best academic paper presented at these meetings is selected by a committee of investment research experts.

AAII awards the writers of winning papers. Papers are selected based on the quality and thoroughness of research and on the contribution to shaping effective investment decisions.

Since the program began in 1983, more than 150 awards have been presented. Recent award-winning papers and recipients include:

• “Out of Sight No More? The Effect of Fee Disclosures on 401(k) Investment Allocations,” by Mathias Kronlund of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Veronika K. Pool of Indiana University and Vanderbilt University, Clemens Sialm of University of Texas Austin and NBER and Irina Stefanescu of the Federal Reserve System, awarded by the Financial Management Association.
   
• “Intraday Arbitrage Between ETFs and Their Underlying Portfolios,” by Travis Box of Clemson University, Ryan Davis of University of Alabama at Birmingham, Richard B. Evans of University of Virginia and Andrew A. Lynch of University of Mississippi, awarded by the Eastern Finance Association.
   
• “In Military We Trust: The Effect of Managers’ Military Background on Mutual Fund Flows,” by Alexander Cochardt, Stephan Heller and Vitaly Orlov of University of St. Gallen, awarded by the Southern Finance Association.
   
• “Do Institutional Investors Exploit Market Anomalies? New Evidence From Alternative Mutual Funds,” by Xin Gao of Sacred Heart University and Ying Wang of The State University of New York at Albany, awarded by the Southwestern Finance Association.

These papers are technical; however, the AAII Journal does publish the findings of papers that are of particular interest to individual investors. 

Supplemental Benefits

AAII offers several supplemental benefits to members. These include discounts on financial publications and an insured money market deposit program from Discover Bank.

We view these programs as supplemental benefits and do not want to lose sight of our main purpose. However, many of these programs are helpful to a significant number of our members; in some cases, they provide AAII with additional income. For example, with the Discover money market program, AAII receives 0.05% per year on the outstanding deposits. These funds help us to support our investment research grants and to educate individual investors.

Future supplemental benefits will also be offered as opportunities, and not as recommendations. Only you can decide what is best for you. 

AAII Privacy Policy

Our goal at AAII is to offer you the best investor education in a simple and secure manner via internet and print methods. As a publisher, we gather user and member information in order to provide an investor-friendly service. 

We request your email address as part of the registration process for AAII.com. We use this information to contact our members and guest users regarding updates to the website and to personalize the service.

To improve our website, we regularly track usage through log analysis to understand how our members are using the site. This information is used to determine popular areas of the site by measuring clicks and the length of time a member spends on a page. We keep track of this data for determining trends and statistics internally.

AAII.com uses cookies to remember your login settings. This allows you to move through the site and certain member security points without any disturbance. AAII may also use third-party advertising networks that employ cookie technology, but as a publisher we don’t control or have access to those cookies. We are in no way extracting personal information through the use of computer cookies.

AAII maintains a subscriber list. As a publisher/membership organization, we reserve the right to contact our users for our legitimate business needs, such as email and paper mailings regarding AAII products and services, or fulfilling a transaction initiated by the user. However, we do on occasion make portions of this list available to carefully screened companies that offer personal finance products and services that we believe may be of interest to those affiliated with AAII. To the extent we process your personal data for other purposes, we ask for your consent in advance or require that our partners obtain such consent. If you do not want to receive these offers, please let us know by contacting AAII Member Services at (800) 428-2244 or members@aaii.com.

You have control over your personal information and how it is collected, used and shared. To manage your account and the content contained in it, as well as edit some of your personal data and manage your privacy preferences, go to your My Account page. If you do not want to receive marketing materials from us, you can opt out at any time by simply clicking the ‘unsubscribe’ link in any email, or updating your preferences in the email management section of your user account.

This privacy policy is subject to change. For the most current version, click here.