At our conference last week I moderated a panel on the topic of organizational alpha. This is the idea that adding value to an investment portfolio goes far beyond trying to outperform the market. Traditional alpha is a finite resource and can be fleeting. Organizational alpha is something that every individual or firm can adopt to…

I spend a ton of time reading and most of it ends up falling in the interesting, but not very useful category. And that’s okay — not everything you read is going to be groundbreaking. This week I did come across two research pieces that I thought were very useful and wanted to share some…

Warren Buffett recently spent some time giving a talk to a group of MBA students at the University of Maryland and was asked what the most important skill in finance is. This was his response: The most important skill in finance is salesmanship. That’s how you convince someone to marry you and that’s how you get…

Financial advisor Ric Edelman gave Howard Gold at MarketWatch some pretty sobering thoughts on the bond market this past week: “The typical investor today has never experienced a sustained rising-rate environment and they are emotionally and historically unprepared for what happens when interest rates go up 3% or 5%,” he said in a telephone interview…

It would be an understatement to say that the election result caught some people off-guard (just not Dave Chappelle or Chris Rock). When these things happen, rational people try to learn from their mistakes by showing some humility. Political discussions are rarely rational, though, so the past week or so has been filled with hindsight bias,…

We had our first ever Evidence-Based Investing Conference with IMN in New York City yesterday. It was a packed house, we had an unbelievable line-up of speakers and it looked like everyone had a good time. Josh provided a nice recap of the event this morning so no need for me to go into detail on…

The Wall Street Journal has a useful interactive tool that can show investors how sensitive their government bond holdings are to changes in interest rates. For example, here’s what things would look like if rates rose 1% from current levels on a number of different sovereign bonds at different maturity levels: And here’s what would…

“Soros is the best loss taker I’ve ever seen. He doesn’t care whether he wins or loses on a trade. If a trade doesn’t work, he’s confident enough about his ability to win on other trades that he can easily walk away from the position. There are a lot of shoes on the shelf; wear…

First of all let me say this — no one knows what’s going to happen based on last night’s election outcome. The people who have been wrong about this outcome for so long will be the same ones who will tell you exactly how it will play out from here. They will be wrong again….

A few weeks ago I wrote about 10 purchases that are worth the money, but threw in a caveat about one of them — buying a house: I think the idea of buying a starter home is one of the worst moves you can make financially as a younger person. Buying a starter home will…