Laura Carstensen, director of Stanford’s Center on Longevity, wrote in a recent column that reaching age 90 or even 100 is well within reach for many millennials. As a result, millennials will be the first generation ever to spend a third of their lives as what we now call “old people.” That has big implications. […]
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The 2-Minute Thought: Great salespeople are a competitive bunch
Highly productive salespeople are confident and ambitious. They have a plan for themselves. They are driven by money. They care about how others perceive them. And they are pretty interesting characters. Just read Steve W. Martin’s brief piece in Harvard Business Review called “A Portrait of the Overperforming Salesperson.” Martin teaches sales strategy at USC’s […]
The 2-Minute Thought: Why Do We Think We’re So Right When We’re So Wrong?
Please note that The 2-Minute Thought will be on holiday for 2 weeks and will resume July 7. Consider these poll results recently cited in The Economist: Americans think 33% of the population are immigrants – the actual number is 14%. Britons think 24% of their population is Muslim – the actual number is 5%. […]
Who’s In Your Corner?
The U.S. Department of Labor recently issued a new Rule for advisors dealing with retirement accounts. Some background is in order here. Advisors are held to a legal standard of conduct when dealing with investors. But different advisors are held to different standards. Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs) which we are, are held to a “fiduciary” […]
O.K. Time To Get Over It…
Donald Trump is for real. When he first declared as a candidate, charging that Mexico was sending us its thieves and rapists, everyone laughed at his political naivete. Then when the primary season began no one thought that he had a chance against the mainstream favorite, Jeb Bush. And now that he has become the […]
What you should know about stock returns…
What really drives stock returns? 1) Well first it is not GDP growth. This one may come as a surprise. Many people think GDP growth is key to stock returns but as shown in Chart 1, from Ben Inker of asset manager GMO, there is no discernible relationship between a country’s GDP growth and its […]
The 2-Minute Thought: Do Liberal Arts Majors Become Great Investors?
Is liberal arts education good preparation for becoming an investor? Perhaps . . . George Soros majored in philosophy. So did activist investor Carl Icahn. Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, majored in political science. Peter Lynch studied history, psychology, and philosophy. Stephen Schwartzman, CEO of the Blackstone Group, had his own interdisciplinary major incorporating […]
The 2-Minute Thought: Older White Men Are Preferred As Financial Advisors
Wealthy investors are most likely to prefer having older white males as their financial advisors. That’s according to a study done by Spectrem Group, a researcher focused on the investment industry. The study asked affluent investors to look at the photograph below and make a snap judgment about which of the eight financial advisors they’d […]
The 2-Minute Thought: Value Investing Isn’t Dead
Historically, value investing has outperformed. It hasn’t done so year in and year out – and it can certainly underperform over shorter periods of time. But over longer multi-year periods, it has outperformed. The evidence in its favor holds across markets, countries, and eras. Yet value investing has had a terrible period of underperformance the […]
Yeah! Let’s Hear It – We’re #81!
This is China’s world ranking in soccer (“football” to the rest of the world). China, you might remember, is the country that won the most gold medals, 51, at the Beijing Olympics. And yet in the world’s most popular sport, China is just barely ahead of Jordan and Equatorial Guinea and still trailing Zambia (#78) […]
We Are Sometimes Accused of Being Too Optimistic
Not this time. Let’s get right to what could cause the next crisis. China. Time Magazine pointed out in January that the problems of the Great Recession were never really fixed. Financial crises are most often caused by the rapid build up in debt. We saw this with our housing debt blow off in 2005-2008. […]
Can This Kingdom Modernize?
Up to now, Saudi Arabia has survived on oil. Half its GDP and 80% of its exports are from hydrocarbons. But Saudi Arabia is no Norway. Rather than build for the future, it has used oil wealth to fund cushy public sector jobs and generous cradle-to-grave welfare. That’s resulted in a frail private sector that […]
