The Great American Investment Creed of “buy low and sell high” sounds so simple, but it must be very hard to do on a consistent basis, or we would all be a lot richer. To buy a stock like Amazon early on and get rich is the American dream. But it is not very...
With the 4th of July coming up, I thought this would be a good time to pass along a great article from Stephen McBride of RiskHedge on the future of America. With all the media-generated worry and electioneering hype, it helps to keep our focus on what is real....
Artificial Intelligence, or AI as it is called, is all the rage these days. I agree with those who say it may be the biggest technological advancement of our lives, transformative in the way electrification was 125 years ago or the advent of computers in the mid-20th...
Make Money with Postage! Talk about inflation! The U.S. Postal Service’s proposed new price for first class stamps starting in July is 73 cents. That’s up 8% from the stamp’s current price of 68 cents and 32% more than the 2020 price of 55 cents. If you want to...
Ray Dalio is a hedge fund manager that I really appreciate for his Zen-like ability to cut through the noise of the marketplace and make his decision making so clear. The following are excerpts from his recent paper on how he determines if we are in a stock market...
I’m sure you’ve noticed how different the countryside looks when flying over it in an airplane, so we are going to take a look at the financial markets from a similar perspective to see what we can glean. This first chart shows the S&P 500 Index over past 30...
My usual January comment is that I don’t like to make predictions about the financial markets. Psychologically, one tends to get anchored to a prediction they make, and if the markets behave differently, that anchor becomes a pull toward making poor investment...
There are many positives in the stock markets right now. The third year of the presidential election cycle, which is normally the strongest of the four years between elections, delivered good returns as expected. We are in the colder months of the year which are often...
The stock market had a nice rally recently, but we are still in a bear market, and although I don’t want to throw a wet blanket on the gains from the recent rally, I do want to talk about the potential for a continuation of the bear market and possibly even a stock...
When I was released from the army in 1974, I had been assigned to the Command Operations Center - the War Room – for US Army Alaska. We made war plans, executed war games, and analyzed their outcomes. One thing I learned during that period, is that regardless of how...
The economy today in China has many similarities to what happened some years back in Japan. After WWII, Japan’s manufacturing methods were more modern and proving superior to the US in many ways. Japan was so successful that they were buying up iconic properties...
I don’t normally make or even follow predictions because doing so anchors one’s mind to that expectation. If the stock market goes in a different direction than what was predicted, there can be a strong psychological pull on me to make wrong decisions. With that...
