My family’s kitchen will not be profiled on HGTV as a model of organization. We face the practical limitations of 25-year old builder-grade cabinets and constrained space. We also face the reality confronted by many parents of young children. That is, the focus of children emptying a clean dishwasher is on getting it done quickly [...]
Well-known investor Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital has often said, “You can’t predict, but you can prepare.” While markets are cyclical, oscillating between bull and bear markets, you can never know with certainty when the market is going to turn, how quickly it may do so, how far it might fall, or when it will [...]
It is difficult to go more than a week without seeing or hearing advertisements for an investment that guarantees zero risk of principal loss, promises an attractive return (5-10% per year), and insurers lifetime income that never expires. Admittedly, these promises can sound very attractive on the surface, especially for risk averse investors. But are [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
"Describe your perfect day." Such a simple interview directive rarely fails to provide the most telling of replies. Responses are almost never scripted in advance and usually provide productive insight into what motivates the interviewee, what passions she has, her creativity, or how she organizes her day. Responses from previous experience posing this question (even [...]
I'm learning to fly, but I ain't got wings I recently spoke with a pilot about how he obtains and handles the forecasts for in-flight turbulence in advance of a flight. Before each flight, he gets a fairly precise report of weather along the route and something called a turbulence plot, which is based on [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
