There’s a well-known story about how Daniel Kahneman got his start in the study of behavioral psychology a number of decades ago. The story goes like this: Kahneman was asked to help study the performance of pilots in the Israeli air force. The flight instructors were trying to figure out what to do about their…

The votes have been tallied. Here are the financial market award-winners for 2014: Comeback Player of the Year: Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) After a very minimal gain in 2013, REITs are up almost 32% this year. Lifetime Achievement Award: Warren Buffett Remember when Buffett was finished and couldn’t be expected to outperform anymore? People…

Wouldn’t life be much less stressful if the markets were easy? What if you could have completely rotated out of financial stocks in 2007 before they got absolutely destroyed in the financial crisis? Or gone to cash just before Lehman Brothers almost brought down the entire financial system in 2008? Or sidestepped just about every…

“One might wonder if forecasters eventually get bored with being utterly wrong and would like to give up guessing the future.” – James Montier

John Authers from the Financial Times had a great story last weekend on state of the fund management industry. This chart garnered a lot of discussion on social media:

“In the stock market, value standards don’t determine prices; prices determine value standards.” – Benjamin Graham

These were my favorite books I read in 2014. Finance/Business/Investing Young Money by Kevin Roose Roose did an amazing job capturing the current sentiment about two things I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about – the finance industry and Millennials. He spent a number of years interviewing the anonymous young subjects that…

“I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have figured out. I don’t believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody’s that smart.” – Charlie Munger I have a confession to make — I’m a hack. That’s right. I’m consistently stealing ideas from people who…

“It’s deja vu all over again.” – Yogi Berra Emerging markets are in turmoil once again as the price of oil and a rising dollar are causing major issues for a number of developing countries. Emerging markets go through periods of booms and busts on a regular basis, but it seems that investors forget about…

Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful. So easy to say but much harder to pull off in real-time.