It seems there are two extreme factions within the financial advice-giving complex when it comes to media consumption — either everything matters or nothing matters. In one corner, people pay attention to every single news item, economic data release, earnings announcement, market-moving development or geopolitical event. These people live and die with the latest headline….

This week I had the chance to listen a talk given by the CEO of an aerospace company that ships products all around the globe. He walked the audience through the company’s different transformations over the years and ended his discussion with a short video that demonstrated how their state of the art warehouse works.

In The Success Equation, Michael Mauboussin tells the story of a man in the 1970s who set out to find a lottery ticket ending with the number 48. He bought the ticket he was looking for and ended up winning the lottery using his lucky numbers. When the man was asked why he wanted that…

Yesterday I sent out the following tweet after seeing a link from Investment News about how “a million dollar producer has jumped ship”: Obviously, it’s not this guy’s fault that ‘producer’ is really just some industry jargon for how much revenue an advisor or broker is bringing in for the firm.  But if your advisor…

I attended a conference recently where one of the speakers was the head portfolio manager of legendary investor George Soros’s family office. This guy was good. He touched on nearly every hot button issue in the markets and the the economy. After giving his take on the state of the markets and where he was…

One of the biggest reasons people run into financial troubles is because most hate talking about money or their financial blunders. It’s a taboo subject. But I’ve found that working in the investment industry makes it much easier for people to randomly talk to me about their finances. I like to compare it to those…

After the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached the meaningless psychologically significant 1,000 point level in 1966, the market began to falter. During this correction Warren Buffett began to hear from a handful of the investors in his partnership who warned him that the market could decline even further. Buffett said that these predictions brought up two…

Gustave Le Bon was a French psychologist who wrote The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind all the way back in 1895. The passage sums up his findings pretty well (emphasis mine): The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd is the following: Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their…

There was some good discussion on my post from last week about the return numbers on the S&P 500 from 1934-1953 (see Stock Market Losses With Low Interest Rates). A reader made the comment that it was unrealistic to use S&P 500 returns from that time because there were no index funds in existence back…