Today’s Animal Spirits: Talk Your Book is presented by Exponential ETFs: We discuss: Why the S&P 500 is so hard to beat. Why such a small number of companies account for such a large portion of market returns. How could you reweight the S&P 500 to get a smaller, more high-quality strategy? The thinking behind…
Buying When Stocks Are Down Big
Captain Obvious here: It hasn’t been a great quarter for the stock market. The S&P 500 is down roughly 17%. There have been more than 370 quarterly returns since 1926. If the quarter were to end today, this would be the 14th worst in that time frame. The list of the other big down three month periods…
Where to Find Yield on Your Savings
Robinhood announced last week they were rolling out checking and savings accounts with no fees that pay 3% interest. A day after the announcement almost six-hundred thousand people signed up for the program on their waitlist. Ashton Kutcher, an #investor in the company, had this to say: (update: this tweet was later deleted) Robinhood backtracked on…
A History of Fed Rate Hikes
Yesterday the Fed hiked short-term interest rates for the ninth time since 2015. The stock market did not seem to care for this fact, as the S&P 500 fell more than 1.5% while the Nasdaq was off over 2.1%. Considering stocks are already in the midst of a double-digit drawdown, this result didn’t exactly provoke feelings…
Animal Spirits Episode 60: Everyone Should Earn 3%
On this week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben we discuss: Robinhood’s debacle of a rollout for their checking & savings accounts Or was this all a PR stunt? What does Ashton Kutcher think? Do millennials even care about banking regulations? Where can you find higher interest rates for your savings? What can fund flows tell…
Disruption in the Bond Market
Last week I wrote that the one constant in the stock market is losses. And not just minor losses but losses of the double-digit variety. The S&P 500 has experienced at least one double-digit drawdown in half of all years going back to 1950. The bond market tells a different story. Investors in high-quality bonds…
Talk Your Book – International Investing
Today’s Animal Spirits: Talk Your Book is presented by iShares: We discuss: Why diversifying overseas still makes sense. What matters more — valuations or mean reversion? Does value investing work better overseas? BUT WHAT ABOUT JAPAN?! Is market cap weighting really suboptimal? Can factor investing replace old-school active management? Why should investors bother diversifying internationally?…
Prediction vs. Preparation
We’re coming up on that time of year when professional pundits and investors alike trot out their annual forecasts for the upcoming year. I have nothing against forecasts. It can be a fun exercise and if we want to get into semantics, we’re all forecasting in one way or another based on how our portfolios…
What I’ve Been Reading Lately
I’ve been on the road a couple times in the past two weeks so I’ve been doing an above average amount of reading lately. My standard rule for plane travel is no in-air Internet for two reasons: (1) The wi-fi rarely works so it just ends up being a huge waste of time trying to…
8 Questions As We Head Into Year End
Some random questions I’m pondering as 2018 comes to a close… 1. Is it becoming a contrarian position to be optimistic about the future? I’m getting a little sick of the “2016 2017 2018 is the worst year ever.” Our society is far from perfect and things could always be better but if you honestly think humanity has reached…
