“Experience is what you got when you didn’t get what you wanted.” – Howard Marks The Snapchat IPO has done something most finance books, personal finance experts or nagging parents could not — it got large groups of millennials excited about investing in the stock market. The following comes from the USA Today just a…

In the classic 1980s movie Cocktail, young Brian Flanagan (played masterfully by Tom Cruise) shacks up with an older woman who basically becomes his New York City sugar momma. They met at a bar in the Jamaica and it was never going to work out but they made a go of it anyways. When things eventually come…

One of the worst parts about investing for those who go through years of school to learn about finance and economics is that the real world rarely plays out like the textbook theories say. The human element often invalidates studies or theories that take place in a vacuum. The following is a piece I wrote…

Last week Morgan Stanley made some waves in the investment industry by announcing they would no longer carry Vanguard mutual funds. This may seem like a problem what with the growth in passive investing but I say it’s not that big of a deal for the following reasons: No one goes to Morgan Stanley to…

Whenever there’s a sea change in a given industry caused by an upstart, competitor, or new way of doing business there are typically two ways the incumbents can play it: They can underreact, stay on the same course, and hope to keep market share. They can overreact, overhaul their way of doing business, and hope to…

I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about how better technology and an improved knowledge base are affecting the financial markets but these changes will likely have an even greater impact on the labor markets. I tell my wife all the time that our three-year-old will probably work in a job or industry that…

Daniel Kahneman once said, “Hindsight makes surprises vanish.” The hindsight bias can lead investors to constantly fight the last war. Since the financial crisis the last war has made top calling in the markets a cottage industry. Looking back now the peak before the prior crash looks easy. It was not. Predicting when the music will…

A few years ago I attended an institutional investment conference headlined by John Paulson, the man who became famous following the real estate crash for the greatest trade ever. While Paulson is known for shorting sub-prime mortgages he actually specialized in merger arbitrage before tackling the macro hedge fund world. Merger arb is a strategy…

A number of people have asked for my thoughts on this blog post from Lightfield Capital about the potential for baby boomers to take down the stock market in the coming years from forced sales during retirement. Here’s the gist of the argument from this well-reasoned post: a combination of rebalancing from stocks to bonds as people…

Earlier this week I wrote about how holding can be one of the hardest aspects of investing. Anyone can buy or sell but holding takes discipline. I promised a follow-up to discuss how I handle this. To offer a potential solution I’m going to walk you through my evolution on how I’ve come to think…