Stocks are soaring and nearing all-time highs. As they continue to climb a wall of worry, they’re leaving nervous investors stranded on the sidelines. I started thinking about the historical performance of the stock market and wondered why investors don’t buy the best performing funds?
After a...
Full stop. The end. Period. No more. No Mas. I’ve noticed lately that politicians, commentators, and other public figures have been using the term “full stop.” I guess they want to punctuate their point, so the viewer or reader knows they’ve stated their position, and there will be no more...
Twice a year, my neighborhood holds a yard sale. It’s well advertised, so people come from all over town to hunt for trinkets and treasures. The buyers arrive with a plan and a purpose.
The people who visit our neighborhood are seasoned yard sale shoppers. Arriving in trucks with trailers, they...
Schwab dropped a bombshell on Tuesday when they announced they’ll reduce commission rates on stocks, ETFs, and options to zero! Not to be outdone, TD Ameritrade and E*Trade quickly followed suit. As a result of the announcement, Schwab’s stock fell 14%, TD Ameritrade slumped 28%, and E*Trade plunged...
We like shiny new objects. For investors, the object is the initial public offering or IPO. Getting in on the ground floor of a hot offering is a huge draw. A few high-profile private companies are now publicly traded. Companies like UBER, Pinterest, Slack, Lyft, Chewy, Beyond Meat, Levi Strauss...
Interest rates are falling, and investors are starving for income. Coupon rates on U.S. Treasuries are paying less than 2% except for the 30-Year U.S. Treasury bond, which is paying 2.25%. Corporate bonds, CD’s, and tax-free bonds aren’t paying much more. The Federal Open Market Committee recently...
There’s no faster way to clear a room or make people feel uncomfortable than to talk about sex, politics, or religion. These subjects are taboo to most, and they offer no middle ground. They’re polarizing topics, and in a non-politically correct world, they’re guaranteed to upset at least half of...
We want certainty in an uncertain world. We want to know the weather report, and what’s for dinner, and where we’ll spend our vacation, and how our stocks will perform. If given a guaranteed chance of receiving $100 or a 50% chance of receiving $200, most of us will opt for the certain payout of...
While playing football, my coaches corrected my behavior If I made a mistake. They’d stop me in my tracks to point out what I did wrong. The feedback was instantaneous. If they had waited months or years to highlight my error, it wouldn’t have been useful. Because of their enthusiastic shouting, I...
My neighborhood is in the middle of an enormous construction project. It’s chaos. Dump trucks and bulldozers are moving massive amounts of dirt to expand our roads and intersections to handle more traffic. A new retail shopping center and access road are also under construction. Commuters are...
Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos bet on themselves by concentrating most, if not all, their wealth in their company stock. Shares of Berkshire Hathaway, Microsoft, and Amazon have created enormous wealth for these billionaires, and they’re currently the three wealthiest individuals in the...
The Crow and the Pitcher is a famous Aesop fable. The crow is thirsty and stumbles across a pitcher of water, but he can’t reach the water because the neck of the pitcher is too narrow. The crow picks up small rocks and pebbles to drop them into the pitcher and raise the water level. His plan works...