While the best principles concerning investing are probably first, to begin early and second, to invest often and regularly, selling is a whole different proposition. Will Rogers, American humorist of a century ago, wrapped up the whole process like this with a bow: Don’t gamble; take all your savings and [...]
If you needed any further proof about the difficulty in predicting stock market results, you should have it now. Before election day in 2016, you were told that electing Donald Trump would kill the stock market. This year, you were told that just the threat of a Democratic $4Trillion tax [...]
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 [...]
When giving investment advice the last thing I want to talk about is politics. But sadly, these two areas have become so intertwined in the past decade it’s hard to avoid, especially in an election year. I would dare say that actions by politicians now play a larger role in [...]
On November 4, I predict many will be surprised and distraught, whoever wins. Many will not like the outcomes. I will be surprised if we do not know the winner on that day, but investors of either stripe may sell. If there are legal challenges, confusion will reign and investors [...]
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 [...]
One of my favorite movies of all time is Moneyball. In the film Brad Pitt portrays legendary general manager Billy Beane who is credited with changing the paradigm of how baseball players are analyzed and assessed for value. In a classic scene, he gets into an argument with his lead [...]
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 [...]
Pat Farrell, Owner of Sibley Orchards, once told me “The more you talk with people of different viewpoints, the clearer your own perspective becomes.” That simple statement has carried with me and seems to be very appropriate for the times we are living in right now. In our current information [...]
The two conditions are usually unrelated. Mr. Market is concerned most with the question of whether, in 6 to 12 months in the future, economic conditions will be better or worse. More specifically, an investor continuously makes a judgment about the probable progress of individual companies, industries, and the economy, [...]
