26 days into my professional career, something that had never happened before, happened. And it was not an unprecedented event that largely went unnoticed – like the time, early in my career, when I inadvertently wore different dress shoes on my left and right feet. While that remains memorable to at least one person, the [...]
Investing in the stock market probably does not feel boring in December 2018. Scary, volatile, unsettling, and capricious are terms that might be used to describe investing over the past few weeks. But not boring. Yet successful investing is boring. Beautifully boring. Famous hedge fund investor George Soros summed it up well: "If investing is [...]
Let's have an honest conversation about things that are rare. 1) A perfect game in baseball In over 210,000 Major League Baseball games spanning 140 years, there have been just 23 perfect games. 2) A full moon solstice According to the Old Farmer's Almanac, there have been 10 full moon winter solstices and 8 full [...]
The two most important reasons to own high quality bonds in a portfolio are to provide diversification and to provide capital preservation. A catchy opening line, if there ever was one. Several big finance words (like diversification and preservation), an unexciting topic (bonds), and a subjective statement that may not seem to have actionable implications [...]
Paul Azinger is described by many as the best Ryder Cup captain ever. In 2008, he led what was arguably the least accomplished, least experienced, and least talented team of American golfers in the history of the Ryder Cup event – a 12-person team, missing the injured Tiger Woods and lacking a single player with [...]
The financial services industry has invented and promoted many ways to rip off people. Fake bank accounts, excessive and unauthorized account churning, non-traded REITs, cross-selling high fee products, pump and dump stock schemes, egregious variable annuity sales, and probably another financial abuse strategy exposed in the business section of this morning’s newspaper. In fairness, there [...]
German, Brazilian, English, Argentine, and Spanish football fans, take heart. Football (or in American vernacular - soccer) is quantifiably the least predictable major sport. In no other sport is luck such a critical determinant of the outcome. So you have that going for you the next time you sit down with a Frenchman to discuss [...]
The following paraphrases a conversation that I have had many times before with friends and clients. It is obviously never the same dialogue but the underlying advice is the same - that you should generally not own your favorite investment or can't-miss stock idea in a traditional IRA. Me: Did you buy this stock because [...]
Brokerage statements are almost universally uninformative, misleading, and confusing. They are largely a means for custodians to fulfill their legal reporting requirements as well as a legacy of yesteryear when we didn't have access to real-time data. They often neglect important information that would be helpful for investors. In many ways, these statements do far [...]
A respected portfolio manager presented recently at an investment symposium where she explained an investment strategy that has consistently maintained zero correlation to stocks. Several times during her presentation, she described why the strategy should be expected to maintain a near-zero correlation to stock markets in the future. During the break that followed, financial advisors [...]
