Head Spinning Times
I personally like studying history because, as written in Ecclesiastes 1:9, What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. This week we have learned the Greeks would rather not pay their debt owed mostly to European banks. [...]
New Challenges Are Opportunities
Last Monday at the international Million Dollar Round Table annual meeting, New York Times columnist and author, Tom Friedman talked about his soon-to-be-published book. His talk entitled The World Is Flat 3.0 had something for everyone. His original work, The World Is Flat, published in 2005 stressed that many past [...]
Where Is The Top?
There are two primary schools of thought about investing in modern markets. The first and dominant is what I call Live Long and Prosper with deference to the late Leonard Nimoy, Dr. Spock of Star Trek. It prescribes being fully invested at all times no matter what is occurring. If [...]
Important Investing Criteria
If you are a DIY kind of person in investing, you need to determine what criteria to use in evaluating choices. This is somewhat easier for individual stocks, but there are also yardsticks of various kinds for mutual funds. The Price to Earnings ratio (PE) is one of the most [...]
New Protection for Old Danger
I have not written on the topic of disability lately, but there may be a new way to protect against its long term financial ravages. As of January 1, 2015, Treasury and the IRS have published final regulations (79 FR 26838) allowing a defined contribution retirement plan (think 401k) to [...]
Oldsters: Don’t Talk to Strangers!
In our country today, we worry about everything that might happen to us or our loved ones even if the odds are ten million to one. Why? If one bad thing happens anywhere, especially to children, we know about it within a few minutes to a few hours. Another group [...]
Goulash
My longtime Rotarian friend, Dick Puhr, late sportswriter par excellence for this newspaper, used to write an occasional column he called Dissa and Datta, if I remember correctly. Today I am following his lead with some information and opinion on a variety of topics, but all related to economics and [...]
Sector Rotation
Mr. Market is often fickle in the short term. I have already complained about the roller coaster rhythms of 2014 leading many (including me) to be too cautious, as it turned out. Last weekend, a Kansas RIA colleague and I were consoling each other about being judged by the exact [...]
Stock Market Sure Thing?
First let me say that nothing in life, not even life, is guaranteed to any of us. And of course, let’s all say it together: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Period. End of story. But then tell me, What is a better predictor of the future than [...]
2014 Retrospective
Regular readers of this column know I often discuss the four year presidential cycles and their effect upon stock market performance. Although I knew intellectually that 2014 had every statistical right to be difficult and negative—the worst of each cycle—that does not seem to help much if one is perfectionistic. [...]