In a recent Financial Times story that profiled several workers making sandwiches at the UK-based sandwich shop Pret A Manger, it was fascinating to read about the rhythms of the shift from 5 am through the breakfast and lunch rush. It also was fascinating to read that there’s a weekly pattern to what customers choose […]
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The 2-Minute Thought Looking for Stocks Like Pepper Food Service
Source: Nikkei Asian Review Do you know Pepper Food Service? It’s a Japanese company that runs steak restaurant chains. If you haven’t heard of it, you’d be far from alone. But you may wish you had because its stock is up more than 800% since January of this year. At one point in late October, […]
The 2-Minute Thought: Tax Reform in a Different Spirit
Suffering from tax reform fatigue? If so, perhaps it would be refreshing to take a look at something completely different — like Japan, which also is planning changes to its tax code but in an entirely different spirit. What’s different? One thing is that although Shinzo Abe and his ruling Liberal Democratic Party are conservatives, […]
And This Year’s Winner Is…
We have been publishing a chocolate Holiday Treat in the December Newsletter for 20 years now, but we must confess it wasn’t until last year that we got our test kitchen act together. Now we are organized. Everyone in the office is challenged to bring in a chocolate recipe to be taste-tested by all and […]
Economics Is The Allocation Of Scarce Resources…
I teach a course at the University of Vermont through the Grossman School of Business titled Personal Finance and Investing. Few colleges have ever offered a course like this. People ask me, “What is this, how to balance a checkbook?” Hardly. Personal Finance is taught so infrequently because it is considered “trade school,” not sufficiently […]
Things Are Better Than We Think…
Ready for some good news before the Holidays? Here it is: The world is happier than you think, and things probably are not as bad as they seem. What do I mean? Take a look at the chart here from the excellent site Our World in Data. It compares how happy people are with how […]
If Some Is Good, More Must Be Better…
Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) are considered to be one of the investment world’s great inventions. When first launched back in 1993, ETFs represented an improvement over their earlier index mutual fund cousins largely because they allowed investors to trade throughout the day rather than accept only end of day prices. Unfortunately, Wall Street, ever on […]
The 2-Minute Thought: What I Learned from Writing a Novel in a Month
Forgive me for taking a slightly longer break from “The 2-Minute Thought” than expected. The reason was that I wrote a novel in the month of November – and then I needed to recuperate for a week. Yup, I wrote a novel in 30 days. It isn’t bestseller material, and it ain’t publishable or even […]
Life is Understood Backwards…But Lived Forwards…
We are Value investors which means we believe that successful long-term investing involves buying out of favor securities selling cheap relative to their earnings and assets. Stock prices are a function of many things – earnings, dividends and the level of interest rates – but equally important is human emotions. Ray DeVoe, a well known […]
So When Is The Next Big Drop Coming?…
Wow, talk about a question beyond my pay grade! But in this charged environment we have to ask. A lot of people are very anxious and nervous in this market. Since March 2009 it has been nothing but up for stock prices. This is the second longest uptrend in history. Only the 1987 – 2001 […]
High School Kids Aren’t What They Used To Be…
Move over baby boomers, Generation X and Millennials. All the fretting and worrying over you is done. The focus now is on Generation Z, or the “iGen.” These are kids and teens born between 1995 and 2012 who have never known life without the internet. They have Instagram accounts before they get into high school, […]
When Success Leads To Failure…
A handful of firms are having a larger and larger impact on the U.S. economy. Nowhere is this more evident than in the stock market where top tech titans Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Google alone represent almost 15% of the S&P 500’s overall market capitalization. Market observers, and Value investors in particular, are scratching […]
