“Man, money aint’t got no owners, only spenders.” – Omar Little Successful investors have some combination of the following: Analytical firepower Math skills The correct temperament A deep understanding of human psychology The right amount of self-doubt A high level of emotional intelligence The ability to think in terms of probabilities The discipline to follow…

In a recent piece, I discussed why it’s not that out of the ordinary for a handful of stocks to account for a large portion of the stock market’s gains. This is just the nature of the beast with the stock market. There are very few big winners and lots of big losers over the long haul….

Every year it seems investors worry that far too few stocks are carrying the market higher. The problem is most people never take the next step to see how often this actually happens. This is a piece I wrote for Bloomberg myth-busting the idea that a few stocks up big are a problem for the stock…

The mid-to-late 1990s in Major League Baseball saw a huge uptick in home runs as steroid use became rampant. Records were being shattered every year as everyone ignored how huge these guys were all getting during a time when there was basically no drug testing. The steroids era in baseball coincided with something of a…

The current market environment is a tough one to handicap. On the one hand, there aren’t any flashing warning signs in terms of euphoria from investors. On the other hand, the “most hated bull market of all-time” continues to charge higher, causing valuations and investor allocations to stocks to go far above their long-term averages. There seems…

A friend recently asked for some advice about his investment portfolio. He told me he’s considering a strategy that would involve dollar cost averaging into leveraged ETFs such as the ProShares Ultra S&P 500 3x Leveraged ETF (UPRO). He told me that he understands the increased volatility, the potential for greater drawdowns and possible decay from…

Some day I’ll tell my kids how we used to have to listen to talk radio in the morning, wait for a DJ/VJ to play our favorite song/video or buy an entire album when we liked a couple songs by an artist. Apple Music, YouTube, Spotify and podcasts have completely changed the listening game for the…

It seems young people get blamed for everything these days. Millennials have been accused of killing marriage, home ownership, chain restaurants, diamonds, department stores, face-to-face interaction and pretty much every long, boring sporting event imaginable. They’re also being accused of killing their own net worth. Here’s a recent survey from Bankrate.com:        In particular,…

While the markets can become detached from reality from time-to-time, they are still a very humbling place for those who try to take advantage. The consensus can be wildly wrong at the extremes but most of the time it’s actually painful to fight the current. Being a contrarian feels like a superior position to be…

“An asset allocation is like a wet bar of soap – the more frequently you touch it, the more rapidly it disappears.” – William Bernstein The terms bubble and crash get thrown around far too liberally these days, which makes sense since investors can easily see two large boom-and-bust cycles in the rearview mirror. Many…