“A great deal of data, and all my experience, tell me that the only thing we can predict about cycles is their inevitability.” – Howard Marks Howard Marks has the uncanny ability to take the complex topic of investing and translate the big picture ideas into simple terms. This is a rare trait in the…

My thoughts on the annual Morningstar Conference.

“Investment success accrues not so much to the brilliant as to the disciplined.” – William Bernstein In January of 1966 the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a level of 990. It would continue trading in a range of roughly 600 to 1,000 over the following 17 years. It once again reached 990 in December of 1982…

“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…

“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…

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

“But there are all sorts of analysts in the investment world, including many that have titles that don’t contain the word “analyst.” An analyst, then, is simply someone who analyzes, who examines an investment problem with a critical eye.” – Tom Brakke Tom Brakke from The Research Puzzle has put out an excellent resource for…

“In the case of equities or real estate or farms or whatever, other very important variables are almost always at work, and that means the effect of interest rate changes is usually obscured. Nonetheless, the effect–like the invisible pull of gravity–is constantly there.” – Warren Buffett