Ben Carlson

Your Biggest Advantage is the Greed of Your Competitors

My first boss in this business was not only an intelligent investor but also a great businessman. I learned a lot from him about investing but also about running a business in general. All of the firm’s client were acquired through word of mouth and client referrals. There were no sales or marketing teams. And…

10 Things I Believe About Investing

1. I believe simple beats complex, but simple is much harder to implement because complex will always sound more intelligent and feel more comfortable to buy into. 2. I believe investors spend far too much time worrying about their buy or sell decisions when patiently holding onto an investment is probably the most important aspect…

Strong Jobs Market, Weak Stock Market

It may not feel like it for certain parts of the population, but the U.S. employment picture has continued to get stronger over the past few years. Job growth has averaged 150,000-250,000 jobs a month for the past 5 years or so. 2015 saw one of the best years for job growth since 1999. According to the…

Re-Visiting the 1998 Bear Market

Beginning in the summer of 1997 a number of southeast Asian countries experienced a financial crisis that would wreak havoc on their currencies and the broader emerging markets in general. Countries like Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea all experienced a severe depreciation in their currencies. The MSCI Emerging Markets Index proceeded to get chopped in half over…

Behavior of the Experts

“Investors are neither rational or irrational. They’re human.” – Jason Zweig Jason Zweig talked with Russ Roberts on the EconTalk podcast this week. I never realized that Zweig helped Daniel Kahneman write one of the best books ever published on behavioral psychology — Thinking, Fast and Slow. Zweig spent two years working with Kahneman on the process and…

While You Were Worrying…

Markets got off to a terrible start to the year. Small caps, emerging markets and international stocks were all in bear market territory. Here’s what happened next: Investors have spent an inordinate amount of time worrying about pretty much everything — real estate, oil prices (being too high or too low), interest rates, economic growth,…

Has There Ever Been a Better Time to be a Homebuyer?

As I continue my search for a new home in the real estate market I can’t help but think about how different my home-buying experience is from what it was like for my parents or others in previous generations. First of all the home search process is completely different. Everything is online these days and you…

The Upside of Academic Finance

My colleague Barry Ritholtz recently sat down to talk with Burton Malkiel — of A Random Walk Down Wall Street fame — on his Masters in Business podcast. Right off the bat Malkiel did some myth-busting on the Efficient Market Hypothesis: What efficient markets are associated with which is wrong is that efficient markets mean that…

Bill Gross & The 40 Year Black Swan

In his latest monthly missive, Bill Gross shares some thoughts on financial market returns from the past four decades: Since the inception of the Barclays Capital U.S. Aggregate or Lehman Bond index in 1976, investment grade bond markets have provided conservative investors with a 7.47% compound return with remarkably little volatility. An observer of the…

Pursuing the Right Goals

“I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.”               – Charlie Munger…