When? In roughly three years, God willing. But then again, no one knows really what perils await me after that. Take for example the poor 83-year-old woman who was brutally killed by her 92-year-old husband (article in Italian here; roughly translated title: “Matera, 92-year-old kills wife with a bat”). If I were in his daughter’s ...
I am not a true animal lover, though I deplore all types of senseless maltreatment applied to them. I eat meat and fish but in the context of a balanced diet, so I like vegetables too. I am also not a true dog lover since not all races talk to me the same way. Retrievers, ...
All politics is local. Together with real estate and food. Regional is perhaps a better word. Despite all the rationalizing capacity we attribute to humans, we usually revert to our surroundings. This may not be so bad; take food for example: where would we be without the uncountable variations offered us by regional cuisines? A ...
This is an abbreviated version of a note I sent to my clients a few months ago. When speaking about “earning a return” on an investment, there is considerable confusion as to what return consists of, and how it can be obtained. Clarifying these points is relevant for it affects how one manages wealth. Return ...
Dilbert manages to put it brilliantly. You can find Scott Adams’ four cartoons “Boss gives Asok investment advice Series” here. My favorite is the third one; benchmarks are indeed tricky. In the long-running debate of whether active managers add value, what we could not fathom in the early days is how it would change once ...
Barely. And with a tremendously rocky ride. Spurred by the most recent weekly piece by John Hussman (hussmanfunds.com), I checked the yearly and cumulative nominal total return figures for the S&P 500 and a few US Government bond indices since 2000. The results can be found in the table below (data from December 31 1999 ...
Monday The Wall Street Journal published an article entitled “Obama Backs New Rules for Brokers on Retirement Accounts” (you can find it here). The gist of the article is the Administration’s efforts to establish rules that would better protect investors from unscrupulous behavior on the part of their investment brokers. This is the problem: a ...
As in Murakami’s novel, reality can be ambiguous. Make sure you can find your way back – or forth – to the one you want. In 1989, Robert Shiller – the same Shiller of Irrational Exuberance fame – wrote a much less accessible book, Market Volatility. In it, he makes the case that market prices ...
For those of you from a younger generation, you must listen to this song. Originally composed by Bob Dylan in late 1967, within months it was re-worked by Jimi Hendrix who is responsible for making it a veritable all-time hit. Even Dylan ended up preferring Hendrix’s version to his own and showed it in ...
Recently I’ve been assisting in the selection of managers for an extensive portfolio of liquid assets. The engagement surprised me more than I imagined at the outset. When we began, I set down two basic axioms: “First, set the portfolio on a sustainable cost path, remembering every basis point saved is a basis point kept ...