Charley Lau is widely respected in baseball circles as one of the greatest hitting coaches in the history of Major League Baseball. His book, The Art of Hitting .300, is regarded as one of the best instructional guides into the science behind a good swing. Here’s the problem — Lau never hit .300 in a single season…
Animal Spirits Episode 31: Stocks Are Not Bonds
On this week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben we discuss: Stocks are not bonds, dividends are not written in stone. How we think about small cap stocks in a portfolio. Why you have to take historical market data with a grain of salt. Are the findings from the famous marshmallow experiment a myth? Why…
Double Digit Returns Are the Norm For the Stock Market
The S&P 500 is up a little less than 1% in 2018 (give or take where it closes today). There’s still a long way to go but if we were to end the year with a plus or minus low single-digit return that would be an outlier. Most years see the stock market give investors…
Playing in Traffic
At nearly every conference speech on behavioral psychology I’ve seen over the past decade or so the speaker will invariably ask the audience, “By a show of hands — how many of you think you’re an above average driver?” Of course around 90% of the hands in the room go up and the speaker will make…
Proof of Concept
The first ever full length animated feature movie was released in 1938. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs quickly became the highest grossing sound movie of all-time. Even more impressive than the enduring quality of this movie (my 4-year-old loves it) is the new business it spawned for Disney. At the time, Disney wasn’t necessarily…
3 Misconceptions About Interest Rates
We’re finally in a rising interest rate environment (I think) after 10-12 years of predictions that rates had nowhere to go but up. Price drives narratives in the markets and the direction of interest rates is no different. Anything is possible but no one has a clue where rates are heading. I can’t predict where…
Animal Spirits Episode 30: What It Takes To Be Wealthy
On this week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben we discuss: Are Jack Bogle and Vanguard actually underrated? Why closet indexing will never die. Why money is flowing out of growth funds even though they’ve outperformed. How much should 35 year-olds have saved for retirement? How different demographics define the term “wealthy.” Why “thinking outside…
The Lump Sum vs. Dollar Cost Averaging Decision
Investors often assume the markets are working against them. For those with a large slug of cash to put to work in the markets, the fear is they will put all of their money to work right before the market takes a dive and completely mistime things. There is no perfect time to invest but the…
Do Long-Term Investors Need Bonds?
A reader asks: If the goal is long-term investing (let us say I will not look at this money for the next 15 years), then does it still make sense to invest in bonds since equities outperform bonds over a long period of time? Before getting into the mushy psychological stuff, let’s run the numbers…
Thinking Outside the Box
This piece from Chief Investment Officer is so avocados I almost did a spit-take when I read it: The legislative representative to the League of California Cities urged the CalPERS Investment Committee Monday to think “out of the box” in finding a way to exceed its 7% investment return projections, saying that cities won’t be…
