I will admit to being a Baby Boomer. It has been a good run. We have always thought of ourselves as very important. Our music is, of course, the best, and our opinions have mattered the most. So it comes as a shock to realize the baton is passing. Millennials now outnumber Baby Boomers. It […]
News & Insights
“Every Picture Tells a Story”… (Rod Stewart & Ron Wood, 1971)
Albert Einstein once said “everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler.” Pictures often tell a very simple and very clear story. We are worried today about the stock market. The economy has been up for almost a decade and the market has marched right along in line. Shouldn’t we be […]
Quality Matters…
Between 1976 and 2017, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway delivered an average annual return of 18.6% over Treasury bill rates — easily beating the stock market’s excess return of 7.5%. That is not just a good run for a few years or a decade. It’s an extraordinary record spanning four decades. On a risk-adjusted basis, Berkshire […]
What to Watch…
Watching TV used to be a relatively straightforward affair. The U.S. had three dominant broadcast networks that offered up a set list of programs. True, your viewing choices were limited and there was a lot of advertising but ah…life was simple! Cable TV, first introduced in the 1970s, disrupted this lucrative business model. By the […]
Are My Glasses Too Rose Colored?…
It’s January and time for the traditional start-of-the-year predictions. Well, not this time. We have learned painfully over the years how confusing this world is and how predictions are often more about hope than reality. So this time we are going to look backwards and, surprisingly, learn some really important things. Nicholas Kristof in his […]
An Old School Financial Analyst Rant…
A company can basically do three things with its net after tax income. It can pay dividends. It can reinvest back in the business through plant and equipment spending, research and development expenditures, and the acquisition of other companies. Lastly, it can buy back its shares. Pretty simple. Spoiler alert, we are not big fans […]
Even the Best Make Mistakes…
Benjamin Graham, the father of modern stock analysis, was so brilliant that in his last semester at Columbia University, he received job offers from three of the university’s departments – English, Mathematics, and Philosophy. Instead of choosing any of these, however, he went to Wall Street in 1914 and achieved extraordinary results. Over the course […]
Fighting the Last Battle…
There are some pretty big problems in the world today. But just as we tend to ignore the positive (see Eric’s first page article), we also tend to miss the fact that slowly and without much fanfare things can change. While none of the problems outlined below are fully solved, they are seeing improvement. Illegal […]
The 2-Minute Thought: The Last Edition . . . And A Few More Thoughts
This is the last edition of The 2-Minute Thought. It’s time – and taking a break from the same format week in and week out often is a good idea. But first, a few random thoughts before going: Anders Hall, the head of Vanderbilt University’s investment office, said in a recent interview with SumZero that […]
Our Chocolate Recipe Pivots to the East…
Hooray – our annual Chocolate Dessert for this Holiday Season. And just to impress you with our effort, listen to this vetting process. Jordan Lafayette here at the office supervised a rigorous Test Kitchen to get to our final result. From early November two employees a week prepared a chocolate recipe. In early December we […]
Competition and Innovation in the Middle Kingdom…
Twenty years ago China was already an export juggernaut but it was difficult to see it becoming a consumer powerhouse. It did not have credit cards, banks were backward in their technology, there was no credit rating system, and above all there was no delivery system for internet shopping – no UPS or FedEx. Well […]
A Beautiful Mind…
You’ve all heard of the placebo effect, where a patient is administered a fake medicine without knowing and then shows signs of recovery. That’s interesting on its own, but would you believe that they are now running tests where patients are told that the pill they are taking is fake and the results still show […]
