“The most instructive, indeed the only method of learning to bear with dignity the vicissitude of fortune, is to recall the catastrophe of others.” – Polybius One of my favorite expressions about the behavior of investors is that we are constantly fighting the last war. The representative heuristic causes us to overweight recent events when…

“People become risk-seeking when all their options are bad.” – Daniel Kahneman According to a recent Blackrock report, 81% of the global bond universe currently yields below 4%. This means income-seeking investors in search of higher yields have been forced to go further out on the risk spectrum (the whole point of the Fed’s interest…

“It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.” – John Maynard Keynes Jeremy Siegel first released Stocks for the Long Run in 1994.  There are people that partially credit this book with some of the stock mania that took hold in the late-1990s. Siegel did call the bubble in tech stocks before the…

“Never argue with stupid people.  They will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.” – Mark Twain No one knows what’s going to happen in the future, especially when it comes to the financial markets. That’s why there will always be topics up for debate. There are some people in…

“The bottom line is that since diversification is the only free lunch in investing, you might as well eat a lot of it.”   – Larry Swedroe I was recently asked if there’s any room in the financial advice industry for innovation at the product level. Specifically, what do I think will be the biggest changes…

“We tend to judge the probability of an event by the ease with which we can call it to mind.” – Daniel Kahneman I was interviewed on the radio show Market Wrap with Moe Ansari last week.  The final question I was asked was, ‘What can we expect stocks to do over the next 3…

“Despite the theory and publicized long-term success of indexed investment strategies, criticisms and misconceptions remain.” – Vanguard

“We can’t change the world. The only thing we can change is ourselves, by trying to get a better understanding of our own messed-up wiring.” – Guy Spier In last week’s Intelligent Investor column for the Wall Street Journal, Jason Zweig discussed value investor Guy Spier’s journey to reinvent himself as both a thinker and…

A lot has been made about the potential for a bond bubble with interest rates near historic lows and not much room to fall any further. Even though rates are down this year, investors have been worried for some time about what happens when rates do eventually rise. As a quick refresher, bond prices and…

“To succeed at any activity involving the pursuit of gain, we have to be able to withstand the possibility of loss.” – Howard Marks