In a recent post I quoted Warren Buffett who said, “The most important skill in finance is salesmanship.” I said that I completely agreed with this statement, but it took me a while to come to this understanding. A few people asked so I decided to expand on these thoughts. I always used to assume that sales were…

Last week my colleague Michael Batnick pointed out that small cap stocks have seen the equivalent of both a bear and bull market this year alone: The people that use all-time highs to scare you are the same people who told you that the 27% selloff in the Russell 2000 earlier this year was the…

Predicting crashes, recessions, black swans and such has become fetishized by many in the investment world since the Great Financial Crisis. Those who predicted trouble prior to 2008 have had a hard time letting go of that one right call and plenty of those who missed it have been trying to make up for lost…

At our conference last week I moderated a panel on the topic of organizational alpha. This is the idea that adding value to an investment portfolio goes far beyond trying to outperform the market. Traditional alpha is a finite resource and can be fleeting. Organizational alpha is something that every individual or firm can adopt to…

I spend a ton of time reading and most of it ends up falling in the interesting, but not very useful category. And that’s okay — not everything you read is going to be groundbreaking. This week I did come across two research pieces that I thought were very useful and wanted to share some…

Warren Buffett recently spent some time giving a talk to a group of MBA students at the University of Maryland and was asked what the most important skill in finance is. This was his response: The most important skill in finance is salesmanship. That’s how you convince someone to marry you and that’s how you get…

Financial advisor Ric Edelman gave Howard Gold at MarketWatch some pretty sobering thoughts on the bond market this past week: “The typical investor today has never experienced a sustained rising-rate environment and they are emotionally and historically unprepared for what happens when interest rates go up 3% or 5%,” he said in a telephone interview…

It would be an understatement to say that the election result caught some people off-guard (just not Dave Chappelle or Chris Rock). When these things happen, rational people try to learn from their mistakes by showing some humility. Political discussions are rarely rational, though, so the past week or so has been filled with hindsight bias,…

We had our first ever Evidence-Based Investing Conference with IMN in New York City yesterday. It was a packed house, we had an unbelievable line-up of speakers and it looked like everyone had a good time. Josh provided a nice recap of the event this morning so no need for me to go into detail on…

The Wall Street Journal has a useful interactive tool that can show investors how sensitive their government bond holdings are to changes in interest rates. For example, here’s what things would look like if rates rose 1% from current levels on a number of different sovereign bonds at different maturity levels: And here’s what would…