I am guessing $4,200 in crisp greenbacks. Statistically I am right but in reality I know I am way off the mark. Let’s do the math. Divide the value of all the dollars in circulation by the U.S. population (man, woman and child) and the result is that everyone should be walking around with $4,200 […]
News & Insights
On Getting People To Say Yes…
Social psychologist Robert Cialdini is an expert on getting others to comply with our requests. How do we get people to buy from us, contribute to our charities, accept a work offer, or join our causes? Cialdini has studied hundreds if not thousands of salespeople, direct marketers, television advertisers, nonprofit fundraisers, public relations specialists, and […]
Fighting the Last Battle…
Learning from past mistakes is generally a good thing. But sometimes efforts to avoid past fumbles can result in a failure to anticipate the next big thing. The general consensus today is that excessive risk taking by large financial institutions led to the 2008-2009 financial collapse. The idea that losses at one institution can spread […]
The 2-Minute Thought: Speaking a foreign language can make you more rational
Source: University of Toledo If you’re fortunate enough to speak more than one language, you have many advantages over those who speak just one. The pluses go beyond navigating another country with ease or having rich interactions with the people who live there. Various studies show that bilingual and multilingual people are more cognitively flexible […]
The 2-Minute Thought: For how long could you do nothing?
Investing is one domain where waiting quietly and doing nothing is often the best course. Why? Because most often the investment actions we take are mistakes. Behavioral psychologist Daniel Kahneman once cited a study showing that, “every action the individual investor takes has a negative expected return. On average, they lose, and the more ideas […]
The 2-Minute Thought: A Contrarian Signal for Oil and Gas?
Imagine this: You are at a stock investment conference where dozens of companies bring their leadership to tell their story to potential investors. You, the investor, get to choose from several companies presenting at the same time. In one room, there is a very popular company, and the room is overflowing with analysts and portfolio […]
The 2-Minute Thought: The State of the Workday Lunch
If you were asked what your lunch break at work is like, you may well answer, “What lunch break?” Forget about the multi-course restaurant meal from decades past. Forget about the lunch hour between 12 and 1 — something The Washington Post calls “a charming relic of the past, like phone cords and typewriters.” Today […]
The Tail of Two Cities…
I was on the Board for many years of the Humane Society here in Burlington and one of the things in life you learn is, there are dog people and there are cat people and there are not that many who are both dog and cat people. Spoiler alert – I am a dog person. […]
How To Deal With The Ups and Downs…
Anne is writing about long term returns on page 4. I will deal with the shorter term here. It seems like every week there is a problem of overwhelming magnitude on Wall Street. If we don’t act on it, surely something dire is going to happen. But you know these overwhelming problems often are not […]
What It Takes To Be A Great Investor…
Investing is complicated. If you are a fundamental investor who looks at companies, you need to understand the company’s financials, grasp the underlying business, delve into how the company spends money to make money, and assess how it differs from its competitors. That work alone is substantial and hard. But it is not enough for […]
Taking the Long (and not so long) View…
The latest copy of the SBBI Yearbook just hit our desks. This annual publication, something of a bible for investment professionals, provides detail on more than eight decades of capital market returns. Much of what we have come to expect from stock, bonds and real estate – both their risk and return characteristics – is […]
The 2-Minute Thought: Like it today? Wait till tomorrow
We are unreliable inconsistent decision makers, according to an article from this month’s Harvard Business Review by Daniel Kahneman, Andrew M. Rosenfield, Linnea Gandhi, and Tom Blaser. We contradict the principles we believe in, we contradict our own prior judgments, and we often do so without realizing it. The authors note that when software developers […]
