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
Part of what made last week’s market selloff particularly unsettling was the speed of the decline. So far this year, stocks had been relatively quiet. For example, the S&P 500 had stayed within a range of minus three percent back in January to plus four percent in July. Then, all of a sudden, stocks fell from the top of that range to the bottom over the course of four days… Read More
Given the low interest rate environment that we’ve endured over the last several years, a lot of our clients ask how we can increase the yield of our portfolios. While yield is an important component of total return (which is income and appreciation/deprecation together), we sometimes see investors stretch for yield without fully understanding the consequences of their decisions. The table below shows the SEC-yield (which is a whole story… Read More
Warren Buffett wrote in Berkshire Hathaway’s 2010 annual report that they ‘will need both good performance from our current businesses and major acquisitions. We’re prepared. Our elephant gun has been reloaded, and my trigger finger is itchy.’ At that time, he was just coming off his largest deal ever, purchasing the railroad Burlington Northern Sante Fe for $26.7 billion in 2009. In 2013, it appeared that he had bagged his… Read More
As I wrote earlier this week, the plunge in oil prices has dramatically cut profits for energy firms (see the article here). Some of those companies have been using their excess cash over the last few years to buy back shares of their own stock, which reduces the number of shares outstanding held by investors. Last year, I looked at buybacks versus dividends (read the article here) and today I… Read More
Yesterday, one my favorite long-time clients and Daily Insights readers emailed and asked whether we had ever looked into the old saying, ‘Sell in May and stay away!’ As it happens, I did do a write up on this topic last May, but we have a new website since then and for reasons that I don’t know, that article didn’t make it onto the new site. So, it was a… Read More
When people ask me how long their time horizon ought to be when investing in stocks, I usually say 10 years. It occurred to me the other day that either I’ve never really looked into this in a very detailed way or I’ve forgotten about it. In either case, it’s now time to look. To answer this question, I looked at rolling returns for the S&P 500 since 1926 for… Read More
There is no doubt that the current bull market is remarkable. Yes, it’s true that this bull market was born in a panic and the first three or four years the market was simply getting back to even from the pre-crisis peak. Since we broke even back in August of 2012, the S&P 500 is up almost 60 percent, which is just a little more than 18 percent per annum. … Read More
It’s that time of year when another batch of kids finishes school and begins working. Old folks like me will offer plenty of advice knowing that most of what we say will be a little lost on these fine young people, just as it was on us when we were their age. You never know, though, good counsel today might get re-tweeted and go viral. My advice is simple: buy… Read More
Yesterday, in my article about activist investors, I referred to a Yale academic who said that one hedge fund index showed that activists had sluggish performance, but then said that this index series is widely known to be troublesome without any explanation for what makes them problematic. Hedge fund ‘indexes’ are well known to overstate performance and understate risk, making them appear more appealing to investors than they really are. The… Read More
