“This is one of the most important rules of investing. If you never peek from the age of 20 to the age of 70, you’ll rip that first 401(k) statement open at age 70, and I recommend you have a doctor on hand because you’ll go into a dead faint. Your heart might even stop….

“Doc Brown was the brains of the operation, but Marty McFly would have done better on CNBC.” – Jeff Macke In Clash of the Financial Pundits, Jeff Macke asks CNBC contributor Karen Finerman if most people are better off not watching financial television every day. Here was her response: You’re maybe better off – not maybe;…

“Job one for the investor, then, is to learn as best she can, to ignore the day-to-day and year-to-year speculative return in order to earn the fundamental return.” – William Bernstein William Bernstein continues to put out thought-provoking, no-nonsense books on investing. Rational Expectations: Asset Allocation for Investing Adults is his latest and it didn’t…

“This [value investing] is a pretty good thing to have as part of your portfolio but it does not always work, cause nothing does.” – Cliff Asness In his recent speech at the Morningstar Conference, Cliff Asness of AQR Capital Management shared his thoughts on the two main reasons that value investing works: (1) Cheap…

My thoughts on the annual Morningstar Conference.

“Unless you can watch your stock holding decline by 50% without becoming panic-stricken, you should not be in the stock market.” – Warren Buffett A good starting point to gauge investment performance is to compare your results against a simple buy and hold portfolio. While there are certainly ways to improve the performance of buy and hold,…

“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…

“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…

“Hey, why don’t I just go eat some hay, make things out of clay, lay by the bay? I just may! What’d ya say?” – Happy Gilmore You know a comedy movie is going to be terrible if they can’t even string together enough funny parts for the trailer.  The new Adam Sandler-Drew Barrymore movie…

“It’s virtually impossible for young workers to deploy their investment capital too aggressively, because their human capital overwhelms it.” – William Bernstein Millennials have been taking it on the chin lately for their lack of basic financial knowledge and understanding. There was a fascinating piece in The Week by Ryan Cooper called The Confessions of…