Around this time last year and in the months to follow, you’d be hard pressed to find a news site, especially in the financial realm, that did not have an article about bitcoin or some other form of crypto currency or blockchain. Today, you’ll still see an article here or there, but by in large, the hype has subsided. As we approach the 10-year anniversary of the publishing of bitcoin’s… Read More
Five years ago, at the five-year anniversary weekend remembering the collapse of Lehman Brothers, I wasn’t ready to deal with the bad memories of that terrible time. Granted, what happened 10-years ago in financial markets was not like being in a war, a natural disaster, sick with a terrible disease or the victim of a terrible crime, but it was still upsetting to me (no doubt because I live in… Read More
When I graduated from college and started working for Mark Twain Bank’s brokerage unit, there was an older gentleman who occupied one of the offices in the branch. I’m not sure he was actually employed by the bank at that point, but I was told that he had been an important executive at one time. He came in around nine, read the newspaper (we all did in those days), made… Read More
I feel as though I’ve written this article a few too many times: value investing is struggling. Pioneered by Warren Buffett’s mentor Benjamin Graham, value investing is the method of buying stocks inexpensively, with the hope that the current problems that’s causing the cheapness pass, and the stock will rebound sharply. Decades into Buffett’s illustrious career, finance academics found that the process of buying cheap stocks led to higher than… Read More
One of the interesting things about the current trade skirmish (I’m not willing to call it a war yet), is that we are fighting on multiple fronts. Even though we have tariffs on aluminum and steel from Canada, Mexico, and the European Union, we all know that the primary combatant in this altercation is China. Even more interesting, perhaps, is that we have more exposure to China than ever before,… Read More
As we approach the halfway point of 2018, some things are looking very different from last year. Although it has been a bumpier ride compared to last year, US stocks are on track to have another good year as the S&P 500 is up more than 4.5 percent and the Russell 2000 Index is up more than 10 percent. But unlike last year, international stocks have effectively been flat, flipping… Read More
In the old active-versus-passive debate, the S&P 500 serves as the champion fighter in the passive corner. That’s funny, because the S&P 500 is hardly passive. For example, it’s not a list of the largest 500 companies, but a curated list of stocks chosen by the index committee at Standards & Poor’s. Most of the differences between the index and the actual list of the largest 500 companies are relatively… Read More
While I think it’s far too early to say that the correction is over, the sharp rallies over the past two days are welcome signals that suggest the forced selling that characterized last week’s sharp daily losses may be over. My view of the recent market selloff has two components. First, as I outlined on last Monday, February 5th (click here for the article), I believe that the initial cause… Read More
What the heck happened? Stocks were rolling along, picking up steam even, when all of a sudden, out of the blue, ‘POW!’, the index hit a wall. In reality though, while the move lower was a surprise, it wasn’t really all that surprising. It’s true that I couldn’t have told you the week before that stocks would have fallen sharply last week, but a move like this really isn’t out… Read More
Almost a year ago to the day, I wrote an article that discussed a well-known quote from a famous investor, Sir John Templeton. He said that ‘Bull markets are born on pessimism, grown on skepticism, mature on optimism and die in euphoria.’ Clearly, the bull market that we’ve enjoyed for the last nine years was born in the pessimism of the 2008 global financial crisis. The rally grew on optimism and… Read More
