“Job one for the investor, then, is to learn as best she can, to ignore the day-to-day and year-to-year speculative return in order to earn the fundamental return.” – William Bernstein William Bernstein continues to put out thought-provoking, no-nonsense books on investing. Rational Expectations: Asset Allocation for Investing Adults is his latest and it didn’t…

“If you expect to be a net saver during the next five years, should you hope for a higher or lower stock market during that period?  Many investors get this one wrong.  Even though they are going to be net buyers of stocks for many years to come, they are elated when stock prices rise…

“This [value investing] is a pretty good thing to have as part of your portfolio but it does not always work, cause nothing does.” – Cliff Asness In his recent speech at the Morningstar Conference, Cliff Asness of AQR Capital Management shared his thoughts on the two main reasons that value investing works: (1) Cheap…

“We could spend the rest of our lives researching an ever-increasing number of choices and searching for perfect, but to what end? We have better things to do.” – Carl Richards

“A great deal of data, and all my experience, tell me that the only thing we can predict about cycles is their inevitability.” – Howard Marks Howard Marks has the uncanny ability to take the complex topic of investing and translate the big picture ideas into simple terms. This is a rare trait in the…

“The emotional tail wags the rational dog.” – Daniel Kahnemen

My thoughts on the annual Morningstar Conference.

“Nothing fails like success on Wall Street.” – Rick Ferri

“Investment success accrues not so much to the brilliant as to the disciplined.” – William Bernstein In January of 1966 the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a level of 990. It would continue trading in a range of roughly 600 to 1,000 over the following 17 years. It once again reached 990 in December of 1982…

“Unless you can watch your stock holding decline by 50% without becoming panic-stricken, you should not be in the stock market.” – Warren Buffett A good starting point to gauge investment performance is to compare your results against a simple buy and hold portfolio. While there are certainly ways to improve the performance of buy and hold,…