On this week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben we discuss: How social media has changed financial media for the better. The humble beginnings of this podcast. The case for investing in bonds. More hedge fund closures. Julian Robertson’s poor timing. Your adult children are killing your retirement savings. The Bernank and why so many people misunderstood…
The Case For Bonds
In my last piece we looked at how things are going in the bond market. In summation — rates are up and bonds are down. There are plenty of market prognosticators who are more informed than me predicting interest rates will rise further from here. The 10-year treasury yield currently stands at 3.3% or so. I’ve seen…
Checking in on Bond Market Losses
Interest rates are up quite a bit since bottoming in the summer of 2016. Here’s the 10-year yield since then: This is still a blip on the long-term chart but that’s an increase of almost 2% in a little over 2 years. We finally have that rising rate environment everyone has been clamoring for since…
You Never Know
Steve Martin once described his 18-year stand-up career as, “Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success.” In the late-1970s and early-1980s, Martin was perhaps the most popular stand-up act in the world but it almost didn’t happen. He made a promise to himself…
How Often Can You Buy the Dip in Housing?
A podcast listener asks: I know I shouldn’t expect home prices to crater like they did after 2008, but I’m wondering if there is any reasonable expectation that home prices will eventually level off or drop enough to make a buying opportunity. I just want to buy the dip. We discussed this question on the…
Animal Spirits Episode 49: Buy The Housing Dip
On this week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben we discuss: The new Howard Marks book. Do super-investors like Marks & Buffett actually do more harm than good? The humble beginnings of the first Vanguard index fund. How to call a market top without calling a market top. How SoftBank’s vision fund will impact the VC…
9 Underrated Investing Books
I was looking at the best-selling investing books on Amazon the other day and it always amazes me how old some of the books are on this list: Rich Dad, Poor Dad was published in the 1990s. The Intelligent Investor was originally published in 1949. The Millionaire Next Door was 1996. Dave Ramsey’s book came…
What If Stocks Don’t Crash…
…for a while? It’s not without precedent that the stock market can go long stretches in the absence of an enormous market crash. Benjamin Roth was a young lawyer in Ohio during the Great Depression. He kept a diary throughout this trying period which was eventually turned into a book called The Great Depression: A…
Market Timing is Hard
After reading one of my pieces someone recently commented that my whole schtick is simply pointing out how hard it is to invest successfully. This was meant to be a put-down but in some ways it’s true. I write a lot about how hard investing can be because it is hard. Anyone who tells you it’s…
Darwin’s Golden Rule
One of the oddities of the information age is that it hasn’t really led to an enlightenment of knowledge. In many ways, the firehose of information has made some people less informed. There are people who believe the earth is flat, the moon landing was a hoax, and Australia doesn’t exist. But beyond the conspiracy…
