Professional football players can seem unbreakable. When a wide receiver gets slammed with a vicious tackle and pops right back up for the next play, it can be hard to imagine anything taking him down, ever.

But those same indestructible professional athletes often find themselves powerless against financial scammers and their own insufficient money management skills.

“I think, ultimately, it comes down to being a target that people see as potentially vulnerable and lacking financial literacy,” said Jordan Hicks, a Philadelphia Eagles linebacker and Super Bowl LII ring-holder.

Living a long and fulfilling life is the quest of most of us. And as a society, we work together in technology, healthcare, and other fields to contribute to the increased longevity that Americans now enjoy compared to earlier generations.

But with our longer lifespans, will we each have enough money to support our lifestyle? And will we be prepared to meet the health related and long-term care expenses that have increased alongside our longevity?

It matters not what lines, numbers, indices, or gurus you worship, you just can't know where the stock market is going or when it will change direction. Too much analytical effort is wasted trying to predict course corrections… even more is squandered comparing changes in portfolio "market value" with unrelated indices and averages.

If we reconcile in our minds that we can't predict the future (or change the past), we can move through the uncertainty more productively. Let's simplify portfolio performance evaluation by using information that we don't have to speculate about, and which is related to our own personal investment programs.

If you were to Google "stock market volatility", you would find a wide range of observations, conversations, reports, analyses, recipes, critiques, predictions, alarms, and causal confusion. Books have been written; indices and measuring tools have been created; rationales and conclusions have been proffered. Yet, the volatility remains.

Statisticians, economists, regulators, politicians, and Wall Street gurus have addressed the volatility issue in one manner or another. In fact, each day's gyrations are explained, reported upon, recorded for later expert analysis, and head scratched about.

Fascinating, aren't they, these security markets of ours, with their unpredictability, promise, and unscripted daily drama. But individual investors themselves are even more interesting. We've become the product of a media driven culture that must have reasons, predictability, blame, scapegoats, and even that "four-letter" word, certainty.

We are becoming a culture of speculators, where hindsight is replacing the reality-based foresight that once was flowing in our now real-time veins. Still, the markets have always been dynamic places where investors can consistently make reasonable returns on their capital. If one complies with the basic principles of the endeavor and doesn't measure progress too frequently with

Moving the needle on gender pay disparity.

What industry has the greatest pay disparity between genders? If you guess the financial advice industry, you’re a winner. The gender pay disparity (GDP) between male and female financial advisors is a whopping 60 percent. These are men and women working at the same job, with the same level of education and years of experience.

Natasha Lamb, a managing partner and co-founder of the Boston-based firm Arjuna Capital, says she was shocked to find out her own occupation has such disparity.

If it works for one or ten, it ought to work for 1,000, right?

That’s the philosophy used by Troy Tisue and his team at TAG Resources, LLC, to identify the best employer-sponsored employee retirement benefit plans for the firm’s clients.

He knows that for many employers, going it on their own is too costly. By joining a pool of employers all purchasing the same type of benefit plan, Tisue’s clients have access to much more affordable retirement plans to offer to their employees.

Several high-profile figures bashed Bitcoin recently, but what’s really going on?

As Bitcoin plummeted from its $20,000 all-time high to a more modest price at about $8,000, the critics, almost immediately, started piling on.

“At this point in time, the money has been made in bitcoin already,” said Jordan Belfort, the so-called “Wolf of Wall Street” who is now a motivational speaker. Belfort, in an interview with “The Street,” took aim at Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, describing proponents of the fiat fund as “scamsters.”