One of the most difficult aspects of investing is that to create a successful investment process you have to get used to the fact that you’re bound to have competing ideologies at times depending on where we are in the investment cycle.

There are many market analogies and cliches that can actually be useful, but there are plenty that are useless or could use some context. Here are two phrases I hear all the time that I could do without. “The easy money has been made.” The Warren Buffett Way by Robert Hagstrom was published in 1994….

Earlier this week I posted a handful of graphs that showed rolling returns for the stock market over various time frames. The point was to show how much variation in performance there’s been historically over shorter time frames compared with a much narrower range in long-term returns. A few people asked me to show similar charts…

Earlier this month the Federal Reserve released the complete transcripts of all 11 policy-making meetings that took place in 2009. The financial media dissected every line item of the nearly 2,000 pages from these meetings. Investors and economists eat this stuff up because you get to see what Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen and others were…

In a research note late last year, AQR’s Cliff Asness described what long-term means when it comes to the markets (emphasis mine): Basically, we know a lot more about volatility than the level of returns over the short term (and remember five years is still pretty short-term). I think we all know this already, and…

Paul Sullivan of the New York Times had an excellent article this week that concerns how people really think about finances and the impact they can have on our lives. In the piece he talks to Barnaby Riedel, a researcher who’s been trying to figure out how money and investments fit into a person’s overall financial…

Morgan Housel wrote a great piece this week called What’s Wrong With Finance where he laid out four problems that stem from the fact that finance is strange in so many ways. Here were his four problems: Problem No. 1: Extreme bias toward action, mostly due to exploitative fee arrangements. Problem No. 2: An overuse…

Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio had everyone in the financial industry talking this week when he put out a client note on the potential risks from the Fed raising rates too quickly. Specifically, Dalio made reference to the 1937 scenario where the Fed acted prematurely in the aftermath of the Great Depression which sent the economy and…

The National Institute on Retirement released a study last week that further reinforced the idea that a large majority of people are struggling to save for retirement. This was the stat that really grabbed my attention: Eighty percent of working households have less that one year’s worth of their annual income saved. Even scarier is the…

The latest SPIVA mutual fund scorecard was released last week and it was more of the same from the past few reports — the majority of active mutual funds underperformed their respective benchmarks over the past 1, 3, 5 and 10 year periods. These numbers are well-documented at this point so I’ll spare you the…