As an unapologetic capitalist, one of my core beliefs is that competition in business is the life blood of American prosperity. In a free market economy, businesses completing with one another for customers naturally leads to better value in the items and services they provide, and also leads to higher [...]
My son loves video games. His favorite is something called Fortnite. In the game you run around a digital world trying to shoot and eliminate other players the same way I did as a kid in the woods behind my house with nerf guns. The game is totally free to [...]
When asked why he doesn’t share his political views publicly, basketball great Michael Jordan famously replied “because Republicans buy sneakers too.” You can agree or disagree with his stance on a philosophical level, but from a purely business standpoint I agree with him that in marketing there is rarely a [...]
Unless you have been in a jungle somewhere, without a smart phone, for the past week, you have heard of the youthful group of stock trading investors acting like a flash mob. I cannot pretend to understand all of the communication technology that enables the group to coordinate. But I [...]
Most people would seem to be eagerly anticipating the end of 2020. Many of us have lost beloved family members or friends to the Virus. Perhaps a billion or more have had their financial health severely damaged or ruined. Experts called for the initial economic shutdown in late winter in [...]
Anyone who knows me knows I love a deal. For that reason, “Black Friday” is one of my favorite days of the year. For over twenty years I have been out before dawn the day after Thanksgiving, shivering in the cold waiting to be one of thousands of people flooding [...]
The good news for Mr. Market is the lack of any earthshaking mandate coming from the election last week. He loves legislative inertia or gridlock, the popular term. Why? If it is more difficult to sweep through major policy changes, then it is easier to determine the natural financial winners [...]
Three weeks before the election, I am in a state of inner turmoil and foreboding. Me, the optimist for whom the glass is always mostly full. (But I have heard that an optimist is a person who just does not understand the situation!) If ever I have bobbed in a [...]
As a financial advisor, you can count on human nature to indicate where you are in the investing cycle. As the summer progressed and the stock indexes marched steadily higher, people began asking why we had not revved up the engines to full speed. We read about new young investors [...]
It’s amazing how quickly things can change. A little more than 5 years ago my wife and I were struggling to sell our home in a housing market that was in dire straits. At one point during the year long process, more than half of the homes in our cul-de-sac [...]
