News & Insights

“My tax person is retiring and no one I’ve called is taking new clients, is there anybody you can recommend?” This is a common question for us at H+D, and a frustrating one, as the answer is all too often “no.” When we can, we try to connect clients who need estate, insurance, tax, or […]

The Strait of Hormuz closure at the end of February led to the largest disruption of global oil supply in history, with some observers predicting that crude oil prices would skyrocket from $60 per barrel to above $200 if the conflict persisted. Well, the conflict persists and yet the direst predictions of an oil crisis […]

Five decades ago, the average Chinese hoped for the ‘Three Bigs’: a bicycle, a wristwatch, and a manual sewing machine. After the ‘Reform and Opening Up’ policies were instituted by Deng Xiaopingin 1980, change occurred quickly. Over the past forty-five years, more people have been lifted out of poverty than has ever happened in any […]

For the second installment of our quarterly book club at H+D, we searched for a balm for the previous entry, “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It,” by Cory Doctorow. His 2025 bestseller offered a depressing deep dive into the almost inevitable decay of online platforms, driven primarily by corporate […]

From Visual Capitalist, an infographic on the share of homes that use air conditioning in each U.S. state.

We recently initiated a quarterly book club in the H+D office, and expect to make our thoughts on these books a regular feature of this publication. The inaugural selection was Cory Doctorow’s 2025, “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It”, which turned out to be a somewhat depressing first entry. […]

These last few weeks, investor attention has shifted away from all-things AI to the latest conflict in the Middle East. But when the clash ends, sooner rather than later we hope, AI will once again take center stage and for good reason. This rapidly evolving technology has the capacity to fundamentally alter key aspects of […]

From Visual Capitalist, an infographic on the energy mix used by the world’s top economies BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS

Every so often, we like to bring the people behind the scenes to the front pages. It has been a couple years since we last did so, and since then we’ve added some new faces and evolved some of our roles. We firmly believe the reason clients stay with us is for the people—they form […]

…and the winner is, childcare! More on that later. For now, welcome to the 40th year of the Hanson Index, our annual look at the cost of everyday life in Burlington. What began as a simple snapshot of local prices has become a record of how inflation reshapes our financial reality. Let’s start with a […]

Welcome to the new-look Thoughts newsletter! You will notice we have moved to a quarterly cadence and a more free-flowing format where articles might extend beyond one page–that is, in the PDF (below), which we believe is the best format to enjoy this publication. We made these changes to give us more room to cover […]

The S&P 500’s total return for 2025 is currently around 17%, following 25% in 2024 and 27% in 2023. Especially with all this AI bubble-talk, it does not feel like a stretch to suggest these returns are unlikely to last. So why not sell now and “lock in” these gains? The investor Peter Lynch provides […]