Oxyphenbutazone is a non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory drug used mostly in eye-drops that was pulled from markets worldwide in the mid-1980’s for its link to bone marrow depression. More interestingly, but perhaps just as trivial, Oxyphenbutazone represents the highest possible scoring play in Scrabble. Play it across three triple word score squares and eight already-played, perfectly positioned [...]
Few things in our profession are more frustrating than when financial advisors deliver bad financial advice. It doesn’t have to be that bad financial advice is dishonest or delivered for the wrong reasons (like it is so often, for the benefit of the advice-provider). It is just that misguided or blatantly wrong financial advice hurts consumers and [...]
Let’s start with a debatable, but widely held fundamental concept of investing: the best predictor of future returns for stocks is the current valuation. This is generally true of a single stock, a sector, or an entire country’s stock market. Academics and practitioners debate whether important factors like gross profitability, price momentum, earnings momentum, yield, [...]
You probably do not know who Jim Simons is. He likes it that way. Simons is a quiet figure who is not interested in self-promotion and does not need to be told how great he is. Despite undoubted countless interview requests over the past 35 years, Simons has largely declined the opportunity to tell his [...]
Spend any time working in the kitchen of a restaurant and you will think of restaurants very differently going forward. Following a short experience in a restaurant kitchen during college, I’ve never once sent a meal back for being undercooked, overcooked, or even the entirely wrong order. Use your imagination and we can just leave [...]
Last Friday here in Atlanta, local businesses closed, restaurants shut their doors by late afternoon, school activities were cancelled, and the Atlanta metro region went under a State of Emergency in anticipation of a debilitating storm. Meteorologists unanimously predicted 2-5 inches of snowfall later that evening – an obviously dire amount of snowfall by southern [...]
I was a recent college graduate and there I was on the trading desk of a large institutional investment manager, entrusted with a role well beyond the pay grade of a newly minted liberal arts history major. Like many people in their first job out of college, my primary objective was not to make a [...]
The following is our quarterly investment letter that was recently sent to clients. 75 years ago this month, a thrilling World Series concluded what many baseball historians decidedly describe as the best baseball season ever. That season is notably remembered for two historic accomplishments: Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak and Ted Williams finishing the season with [...]
“It might be the simplest play in all of sports, and the most effective. Give the ball to Michael Jordan, and everyone else get out of the way.” These two sentences began an Associated Press article on May 28, 1989. The day prior, the Chicago Bulls had the ball in the closing seconds of a [...]
There should be natural skepticism when a financial advisor creates a list of the best and worst questions to ask a financial advisor. It sounds a little like game show fixing of the 1950s where some contestants knew the questions before they were asked. However, experience provides a unique advantage. We have heard insightful questions and we have [...]
