Why? Because when prices are really cheap, the stories are absolutely awful. The flip side of the coin, however, is that when prices are cheap, expectations are low and with even the slightest improvement in sentiment, stocks can jump sharply. Remember back in January a year ago? The S&P 500 declined 4.9% in the first […]
News & Insights
Why We Love Our Jobs… Or Don’t…
In Glassdoor’s yearly survey of the best places to work, California-based chain In-N-Out Burger always does surprisingly well. This year, In-N-Out Burger ranked as the seventh best place to work in the nation. In Silicon Valley it was number three, surpassed only by number one Facebook and number two Google. It tied with LinkedIn and […]
Navigating The Retail Maze…
The 2016 Holiday season did bring some good cheer. Retail sales for the November-December period increased 4% when compared to 2015. In many respects, this result was not surprising considering the recent positive data on job gains, average hourly earnings and household net worth. But a look behind these optimistic numbers shows that the negative […]
The 2-Minute Thought: Stock valuations seem high so you should . . . do nothing?
The good news is that U.S. stocks have had a great run – and especially so since the November election. The more worrying thought is that they look more expensive. We know that when stock valuations are high, returns in future years are lower — and vice verse. From over 100 years of stock data, […]
The 2-Minute Thought An Oversupply of Haigui?
How quickly things change. Not so long ago, most Chinese who studied overseas stayed overseas because job prospects were far superior to those in China. Now, according to China’s Ministry of Education, three-quarters of Chinese students are returning home after graduation. Finding a job overseas has gotten harder, while the job market in China has […]
The 2-Minute Thought: This year, spend less time on time management . . .
entrepreneur.com A recent article in The Guardian by Oliver Burkeman titled “Why time management is ruining our lives” addressed — well, how time management is ruining our lives. How we spend each day and string those days together into a meaningful life has been a central human question since ancient times. But in this modern […]
The Test Kitchen is Under New Management…
We first started publishing a Holiday Chocolate recipe in 1998. This is our 19th version. We have been a little unscientific with our selections in the past. We often have come down to crunch time with the desperate plea, “Anyone got a recipe for this year’s letter?” Well no more. Seriousness is Job One in […]
Wow, What An Amazing World We Live In!…
A recent story from China in The New York Times International edition (November 15, 2016) caught my eye. Many “common cuckoos” spend the spring and early summer of each year in wetlands near Beijing, China. They feast on caterpillars and grubs in the wet soil. By summer, however, temperatures get pretty hot and the cuckoos […]
The Psychology of Gift Giving…
Gift giving can be a simple joy or a source of stress. We want to give gifts that bring happiness to the recipient, but we know they can fall flat or end up being returned, discarded or re-gifted. When we laugh at Johnny Carson’s quip about there being only one fruitcake in the world that […]
Spinning Our Wheels…
The holiday season brings warm recollections of leisurely time spent with family and friends. But increasingly I have been wondering if these memories are more relics of the past than an accurate portrayal of the average worker’s experience today. Average annual hours worked has fallen over the last six decades across much of the industrialized […]
The 2-Minute Thought: Doing Good Work at In-N-Out Burger
USA Today It’s always a source of wonder when fast food chain In-N-Out Burger ranks near the top of Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work, as it has in recent years. This year (the 2017 list) it ranked seventh nationally. Silicon Valley News reported that In-N-Out was the third best place to work in Silicon Valley […]
The 2-Minute Thought: A Stock Picker’s Market?
People say it’s starting to look like a stock picker’s market. That’s because the performance of individual stocks and the performance of different sectors are diverging. Since President-elect Trump’s win in November, the disparity in returns among different sectors is the highest it’s been since 2009. In addition, correlations among individual stocks have been falling. […]
