This week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben is sponsored by YCharts: Mention Animal Spirits and receive 20% off your subscription price when you sign up. We discuss: Steve Mnuchin’s bizarre statement on the banks. Big up and down days in the market. What’s the biggest cause of the market’s downturn? Are algos really to blame…
Ben Carlson
Mindless Resolutions
The book Mindless Eating gives a stat that can’t possibly be verified but I still kind of believe it. It estimates that 95% of people who lose weight on a diet end up gaining it back. Maybe this is one of those stats that’s a little deceiving like the 50% divorce rate. That stat is so…
The Forgotten Bear Markets
After closing at an all-time high on September 20, the S&P 500 entered a bear market on Christmas Eve. The technical definition is a 20% peak-to-trough drawdown, but I’m willing to give this 19.8% fall the benefit of the doubt. There was a decent rally the rest of the week, but regardless if this was THE…
5 Thoughts on the Market Downturn
Some random thoughts on the current state of the markets… 1. This is why you own bonds. Here’s the aggregate U.S. bond market versus the S&P 500 and Russell 2000 ETFs over the past 3 months: In the past, people probably thought they owned bonds for the steady income stream. That may still be the case for…
Big Up Days In The Stock Market
On this week’s Animal Spirits podcast Michael and I predicted some vicious countertrend rallies in the midst of the current bear market in stocks. Here’s the tape: There was some fortuitous timing with the release of the show and the market action that followed. We taped this one a little early because of the holidays…
Animal Spirits Episode 61: The Bear Market
On this week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben we discuss: The carnage in the stock market. Does this mean we’re going into a recession? How historically bad is the latest quarter in stocks? Why young people should be happy about the drop in stock prices. Why the Fed can’t win no matter what they…
My 2018 Recommendations
At the end of each episode of Animal Spirits, Michael and I give our recommendations for things we’ve been reading or watching. I’ve also been known to give a review on Twitter or here on the blog. So I decided to put together a list of my favorite recommendations for TV shows, movies, and books I’ve…
Talk Your Book: Breaking the Market Cap
Today’s Animal Spirits: Talk Your Book is presented by Exponential ETFs: We discuss: Why the S&P 500 is so hard to beat. Why such a small number of companies account for such a large portion of market returns. How could you reweight the S&P 500 to get a smaller, more high-quality strategy? The thinking behind…
Buying When Stocks Are Down Big
Captain Obvious here: It hasn’t been a great quarter for the stock market. The S&P 500 is down roughly 17%. There have been more than 370 quarterly returns since 1926. If the quarter were to end today, this would be the 14th worst in that time frame. The list of the other big down three month periods…
Where to Find Yield on Your Savings
Robinhood announced last week they were rolling out checking and savings accounts with no fees that pay 3% interest. A day after the announcement almost six-hundred thousand people signed up for the program on their waitlist. Ashton Kutcher, an #investor in the company, had this to say: (update: this tweet was later deleted) Robinhood backtracked on…
