The unemployment rate sits at 4.3%. Inflation is subdued at just 2.2% over the previous 12 months. The 10-year treasury bond yield is still well below 3%. The S&P 500 passed through 2500 recently and has hit 45 (and counting) new all-time highs in 2017 alone. Stocks haven’t seen a 10% correction in almost 2…

One of the hardest parts about giving financial advice, or any advice for that matter, is the fact that good advice alone is not enough. Good advice is all around us and people simply choose to ignore it much of the time. Telling a friend or family member who is overweight to eat better and…

Vienna, Austria is one of my favorite cities on the planet. I spent an entire summer living and studying there in college. It was one of the best experiences of my life. Our classrooms were located in the City Center right across the street from the Vienna State Opera House. It’s a stunning piece of architecture….

My first boss in this industry was old school. One of the first things he taught me to help understand the institutional investment landscape was the Prudent Man Rule. This was a piece of legislation from the 1800s that basically outlined the idea behind being a fiduciary when managing assets for other people. The Prudent…

There’s so much going on in the markets that it’s hard to think in terms of a goals-based framework when investing. Paying attention to the best-performing stocks, digging through the 52-week low list for bargains or trying to figure out when the next recession will hit are all much more exciting activities than figuring out…

The world has a strange way of not ending, despite the prognostications for the end of days by a number of cult leaders over the years. One such false prophecy was studied by a group of researchers from the University of Minnesota who joined a cult in Chicago incognito to study it from the inside. The…

A few people have asked me in the past week how I find the time to write so much. There are a number of explanations for this — its part of my routine, I prioritize it and I don’t have a ton of other hobbies (no fantasy football, no Facebook, no drinks with friends every night,…

These days anytime something goes up someone is almost sure to call it a bubble. This is especially true of anything that resides in the public eye. Index funds and ETFs fit the bill here which has led to a chorus of investors, mostly of the active fund management variety, to call these products a…

I saw the following headline on CNBC last week: This was the first response that popped into my head, as shared on Twitter: This is fairly simple, and some would say obvious, advice on the markets but sometimes investors need to be reminded of the simple and obvious The obvious stuff is often the first…

“There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.” – Aristotle People with brain damage may make better investment decisions. That’s the conclusion of a study from 2005 by a team of researchers who looked at the gambling habits of different subjects. They studied patients who had lesions in the emotional areas of their…