"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 [...]
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, [...]
“Congratulations. I always thought that record would stand until it was broken.” -Yogi Berra in a telegram to Johnny Bench after Bench broke Berra's record for most home runs as a catcher. We recently explained why the Dow Jones Industrial Average is a terrible, no good, very bad index. In spite of our best [...]
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 [...]
On a recent visit to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), I surprisingly stumbled upon an exhibit featuring classic video games such as Tetris, Asteroids, and Pac-Man. The games were displayed on active video screens with an adjacent explanation of the creativeness or design elegance for why they were each chosen. In their heyday, these [...]
At various points in life, individuals begin to avoid roller coasters, back flips off the high dive, cartwheels, and full contact football. They take more frequent breaks in their weekly tennis game and aspire to completing a marathon rather than finish one in less than 3-hours. Instead of travelling to Spain to run with the [...]
