It’s only been eleven days since Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration. A lot has happened in that time. We’ve had executive orders, immigration bans, protests, regulation changes, people getting fired and hired in senior White House positions and much more. It seems you can’t go a couple hours without something new happening that causes an uproar….

One of the benefits of advances in technology is the fact that we’re overflowing with information. This can be a double-edged sword. As Chuck Klosterman said, “We now have immediate access to all possible facts. Which is almost the same as having none at all.” Finance is no different in this regard. In the past, you would…

A few years ago I wrote about some of the unfortunate realities of the investment business. They are as follows: All else equal, a talented sales staff will trump a talented investment staff when attracting capital from investors. The products that sound the best are often the worst ones to invest in. There are way too many investment products…

Last week I was talking with a friend and the topic of retirement planning came up (my conversations are so hip these days). He told me he was overwhelmed by the sheer number of variables that come into play when trying to plan for something that is decades out into the future. The entire process…

Dr. Atul Gawande recently shared a story in The New Yorker about a man named Bill who started to experience severe migraines at age 19. The headaches eventually became almost a daily occurrence that would cause extreme pain, make him throw up and generally make life so miserable that he had to quit his job…

Robert Martorana wrote a good piece at the Enterprising Investor for the CFA Institute on how to read the news from the perspective of a portfolio manager. This was really good: Rather than reading less, portfolio managers must learn to rapidly detect what is nonsense and move on. It’s a necessary skill when confronted with…

I think over the holidays my house set a new world record for most consecutive days of Amazon deliveries in a row. I buy everything from Amazon — clothes, shoes, books, technology, cleaning supplies, furniture, household goods, food, drinks and pretty much anything else you can think of. For many of these goods, I save money…

“The essence of risk management lies in maximizing the areas where we have some control over the outcome while minimizing the areas where we have absolutely no control over the outcome and the linkage between effect and cause is hidden from us.” – Peter Bernstein When you spend enough time in the finance industry you’re…

My wife and I went under contract on a new home this past week. It’s all very exciting but also kind of a stressful situation. The new home won’t be finished until spring so we have a few months to plot our course of action on how to sell our current home in the meantime….

In the summer of 2007, the markets experienced a huge dislocation that was something of a precursor to the financial crisis. Many of the largest, well-known quant hedge funds all started blowing up at the same time. Everything they were buying was going down while everything they were shorting was going up, causing massive losses…