Mark Andreessen laid out some interesting theories on Twitter earlier this week about market cycles: Traders like to say that the market has no memory from day to day. But when stocks are only up roughly 53% of all trading days, any single market session is going to be very noisy. What really matters are longer-term…

People always say that investing is more of an art than a science. This is true because there’s always an exception to every rule. Caveats abound when dealing with such a small sample size in a complex adaptive system such as the financial markets. So instead of concrete truths, investors are forced to deal in…

“Hundreds of studies have shown that wherever we have sufficient information to build a model, it will perform better than most people.” – Daniel Kahneman Ray Dalio and Bill Ackman are arguably two of the greatest hedge fund managers in the business today. Last week they shared the stage at an investment conference to discuss…

Where Are the Customers’ Yachts by Fred Schwed was written almost 75 years ago. I only read this book for the first time a few months ago and it’s remarkable how well it still holds up after all these years. It’s probably the funniest investment book I’ve ever read (out of an admittedly small set…

From 1928 to 2014, stocks earned 4.6% per year more than 10 Year U.S. treasury bonds — 9.6% vs. 5.0%. In finance-speak, this is called the risk premium that stocks earn over bonds.

There were a couple pieces of advice given in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal that I thought deserved a closer look. First up, Bank of America is recommending dividend stocks as a fixed income substitute because bonds yields are so low:

A couple weeks ago I looked at John Maynard Keynes’s investment performance and philosophy when he ran the endowment fund at King’s College. Keynes ran a focused portfolio made up of a small number of stocks. One of the results of holding a small numbers of holdings was that his performance numbers were very volatile, something…

Every time I write about commodities being a poor investment option over the long-term, I get a few comments such as this one: Yeah, but what about the 1970s? The 1970s were probably one of the most difficult decades for investors in the traditional asset classes. Stocks and bonds posted positive returns, but those returns…

“I will not abandon a previous approach whose logic I understand even though it may mean forgoing large, and apparently easy, profits to embrace an approach which I don’t fully understand, have not practiced successfully and which, possibly, could lead to substantial permanent loss of capital.” – Warren Buffett One of the questions I’m often…

Tim Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs is arguably the greatest power forward in NBA history. Unfortunately, success puts a target on your back when it comes to financial advice. It was recently discovered that Duncan has joined the long list of rich people that have been taken advantage of through lousy investments or shady…