11 Sep 2015

Debt Ceiling, Here We Come (Again)

Earlier this week, Ryan Craft and I went to Washington DC for a full day of presentations put on by Macroeconomic Advisors. We heard from some of the country’s top economists, including the Director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Chairman of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors (who also happened to be Hollywood superstar Matt Damon’s freshman roommate at Harvard). While I plan to share some… Read More

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8 Sep 2015

California Pension Funds Intriguing Duel

One of the big stories inside the investment community over the past 18 months is the announcement by the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) that they are eliminating their hedge fund exposure and significantly cutting back their private equity exposure (which we wrote about here and here). These are two of the three asset classes that large institutions use that we don’t (the third being direct investment in commercial… Read More

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4 Sep 2015

Oil as an Inflation Hedge

Watching the bottom fall out for oil prices is really one of the most dramatic things that I’ve witnessed in several years.  Thankfully, it hasn’t had too much direct impact on us because we don’t have straight exposure to commodities, click here for the details on why we’ve avoided commodities). Of course, we’re all affected by the price drop.  The good news is easy to remember because I get a reminder every… Read More

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3 Sep 2015

The Chart That Made Me Laugh Out Loud

I think you know by now that I love charts.  I am definitely not saying that I am a chartist – I don’t think I have ever made an investment decision for me or anyone else based on a chart.  I simply think that if a picture tells a million words then a chart must at least tell 1,000 (roughly matching my wordcount) When I saw a blog titled ‘econompic,’… Read More

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2 Sep 2015

Downside Protection That Doesn’t Protect

After reading my article last week (that can be found here) that discussed how we use limit orders to protect us from wild price fluctuations (among other reasons), one of my favorite readers wanted to know why we don’t use stop-loss orders. A stop-loss order is different from a market order, which says ‘do my trade at any price’ and a limit order, which says ‘do my order at a… Read More

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1 Sep 2015

Deconstructing the Dow Jones Industrial Average

In last week’s market turbulence when the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) fell by 1,100 points in a single day, I had to talk about something that I don’t like talking about: the DJIA itself. For the most part, I’m able to avoid talking about the DJIA, which is nice, because I think the index is pretty much an almost worthless relic of history. That said, when markets are volatile and… Read More

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31 Aug 2015

Stocks and the Real Economy

One of the interesting comments that I read in the early part of last week when markets were falling was that financial markets were doing poorly while the real economy was doing reasonably well. Over the last five years, I’ve heard people say countless times that we’ve had a nice recovery in financial assets while the real economy has sputtered along at growth rates well below our historical long-term trend… Read More

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28 Aug 2015

When Trading Goes Haywire

In Tuesday’s Daily Insights, I described trading on Monday as chaotic.  Not only were stocks down sharply, and volume heavy (it was the second most active trading day in history with $630 billion in stocks traded) but many stocks behaved erratically and a number of exchange traded fund (ETFs) prices became wildly disconnected from the market value of their holdings. A quick primer: ETFs are like mutual funds in that… Read More

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27 Aug 2015

Are Stocks Cheap Now?

I thought it would be interesting to see how the market correction this month impacted long-term market valuations, most notably, the Shiller PE ratio.  Unlike a standard PE ratio, the Shiller PE ratio compares the current market price to the average inflation-adjusted earnings for the previous 10-years. The chart below shows the Shiller PE ratio (in blue) back to 1926.  The solid orange line depicts the average Shiller PE ratio… Read More

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26 Aug 2015

The Biggest Implication of the Market Stress

In the past few days, I’ve focused on the fact that corrections like this are totally normal and entirely fit within the financial plans that we create and that we can expect more volatility in the short run but have no new expectations about returns. Today I want to focus on what is probably the most impactful implication of the current stock market rout, which is, in my opinion, the… Read More

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