I put the following thoughts out on Twitter last Friday following the release of the employment numbers: I was a little shocked at the enormous number of replies that read something like this: Well, of course, we’ve had a long recovery and stock market boom. Central bankers have manipulated the markets higher for years now…

A friend gave me a book a few months ago to get my opinion on the investment strategy it was selling outlining. I gave it a read and didn’t get the best first impression. I’m not going to name the book because the name isn’t important. This could have been hundreds of different books or investment pitches….

This week Fidelity became the first fund company to offer index funds — a total U.S. stock market fund and an international stock market fund — with an expense ratio of 0%. Fidelity is a massive company that more or less missed the boat on index funds and ETFs when the first wave hit. This…

Slack is a lot like Twitter from my vantage point. It’s a service I use all the time. It’s become an integral part of my life from both a work and social perspective. Every time I talk to someone else who uses the service they share my love for the platform. And it’s almost impossible to explain its usefulness…

On this week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben we discuss: Facebook’s massive stock price crash. Why my immediate reaction was to buy Facebook after its decline. Why being 30 is so much harder for the current generation than their parent’s. Is trend-following dead? The conflicts of interest that arise when hedge funds have internal…

Charley Ellis is one of my favorite people in the investment business. He seems to always have a similar message but I still come back to that message over and over again because of the way he delivers it. Ellis recently sat down for another chat with Ted Seides on the Capital Allocators podcast. He…

A podcast listener asks: It is my understanding that financial theory proposes that asset prices revert to their long-term mean. If so, does this conjecture apply to interest rates too? Mean reversion is probably one of the most misunderstood concepts in all of finance. On the one hand, it’s misunderstood by performance chasers who don’t…

A reader asked this week if I would update an old performance chart of the S&P 500 I used a few years ago. Here are the S&P 500 calendar year returns shown as a scatter plot: The red line is the average so you can see how wide the fluctuations are from year to year….

Here are some of the realizations I’ve had about finances from being a parent: 1. Yes, kids are expensive but… The personal finance section of any financial publication will be quick to remind you that raising a child can cost upwards of $250,000 from birth through age 18. When you include the obscene cost of daycare…

On this week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben we discuss: The pie chart heard round the world. Why Michael didn’t create a chart crime. Why concentrated gains are the norm in the stock market. How difficult is it to save $1 million in a 401(k)? The worst advice we’ve seen on 401(k)s. Is AQR the…