Warren Buffett released his annual letter to shareholder on Saturday and, as always, it was a delight to read. You can find the entire letter here; but today, I thought I would share some of the highlights. *** One word sums up our country’s achievements: miraculous. From our standing start 240 years ago – a span of time less that triple my days on earth – Americans have combined human… Read More
Most of the time, the topics that I choose for Daily Insights are things that I think I know a lot about. Sometimes, I write about a topic in an effort to learn more about it. That’s the case today: I had never heard of a border adjustment tax until a few weeks ago, wanted to know more and thought I would share what I’ve learned. Some of you undoubtedly… Read More
I am continually amazed by the huge number of thoughtful and apropos quotes that concern investing. I’ve been writing and editing our quarterly newsletter, Portfolio Insights, for more than 15 years and I can still find plenty of great quotes without too many repeats. While I enjoy a great quote, I can’t say that any of them rise to the level of being an investing philosophy to live by, except… Read More
When I graduated from college in 1995 and started in this industry, I was told that the current saying for the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) was ‘10,000 by 2000,’ referring to the turn of the century. It seemed impossible to me because, at that point, the DJIA was trading below 4,500. Just a few months before, one of my finance professors said the market was overvalued. Less than six months… Read More
It’s not a stretch to say that 2016 has been full of surprises! One of the big surprises from our perspective up until the election was the decline in interest rates and corresponding strong return that bonds delivered. I wrote about the surprising decline in yields as early as February and was going a little bananas as yields throughout the world went negative (here, here and here). We never went… Read More
Warren Buffett is rightly considered the most successful investor of all-time. Not only has his holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, grown at a much higher rate than the overall market, he’s managed to earn exceptional returns for much longer than others who have also earned high returns. I was only able to pull data from 1987, but the last 29 years have been extraordinary for Buffett and his fellow shareholders. Over this… Read More
One of the phrases that I hear over and over, but simply don’t like, is that ‘markets hate uncertainty.’ Forget the fact that markets are just made up of people and don’t have independent emotions, I’m talking about hating uncertainty. From a theoretical standpoint, let’s think about how uncertainty affects markets. Let’s start with the idea that the value of an investment is the present value of its future cash… Read More
The Brexit has caused legions of analysts, economists, strategists and other pontificators to busily rework their assumptions about the world economy incorporating what seemed like an outside possibility last week to the new lay of the land. Markets fiercely incorporated their new assumptions into prices almost instantaneously – looking a chart of the British pound, you can see when the polls started to show that the Remain camp wasn’t a… Read More
Yesterday’s insight on drawdowns was quite popular and enough people asked for the same thing, so I thought I would do an immediate update. (Click here for the original post.) The first request was for the full history of the S&P 500 since yesterday’s chart only went back 25 years. I picked 25 years somewhat randomly, but mostly because the other chart that went with it was difficult to read going… Read More
Until I read the book ‘Hedge Hogging’ by Barton Biggs before the 2008 financial crisis, I had never heard the term ‘drawdown,’ which refers to the peak-to-trough decline of an investment or market. A drawdown measures the depth and length of a decline and illustrates how long it takes to earn back money lost from the last peak. It’s a commonly used term in the hedge fund community, partly because… Read More
