I wish I knew. The nature of shocks is they usually come out of left field. But still we fret. Individual investors are apprehensive today, concerned about the recovery and wondering where the next Bubble is. Owners of stock are enjoying the fruits of a rising market but they are not true believers. Wall Street […]
News & Insights
Endlessly Striving and Stressed…
Whenever I visit Korea, as I did several weeks ago, the pace of change never ceases to amaze me. Fashion, food, language, and the shape of the skyline are in constant flux. More English phrases and slang pepper everyday conversation. Koreans look taller and more beautiful on each visit. Whole neighborhoods transform. There are more […]
Secular Stagnation or the Pause that Refreshes?….
For most of the last five years, economists have been scratching their heads trying to understand the causes behind the nation’s frustratingly slow recovery. High levels of indebtedness, the weak housing sector and political uncertainty have all been blamed. Increasingly, the notion that we may have entered a permanent slowdown is taking hold. While the […]
Eric Hanson Volunteered at the 20th Annual Walk for the Animals
Eric Hanson volunteered at the 20th Annual Walk for the Animals held by the Humane Society of Chittenden County on June 15th. This event is Vermont’s largest dog friendly event and features a 1.25 mile walk through scenic Burlington, a 5K Doggie Fun Run/Walk, music, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, fun, and contests! The HSCC raised […]
Julie Won Joined the Board of Easter Seals Bay Area
Julie Won is joining the Board of Easter Seals Bay Area, a nonprofit serving over one million individuals with special needs and their families throughout the Bay Area and northern California.
Julie Won Hosted Investment Tutorial for Girls Innovate!
On June 3, Julie Won hosted an investment tutorial for the winning students of the Girls Innovate! Live business pitch event that was held in May. The girls discussed stock investment, personal finance, and business startup issues in our Palo Alto office.
Staff Completes KeyBank Vermont City Marathon and Relay
Congratulations to the H&D runners for completing the Key Bank Vermont City Marathon and looking as good after the race as before!
What are the Secrets to Life?
I’ll get to that in a minute. First an explanation of how this newsletter gets put together. We all read widely here, newspapers, magazines, trade journals, the internet, etc., and when we find interesting articles we clip them and add them to a big pile which accumulates by the inch and then by the foot. […]
The Mistakes We Make
The best definition of the stock market I know of is from Ray DeVoe, a market commentator with Spencer Trask in the 1970s and subsequently other firms, who said, “The stock market is only indirectly related to economics. It is a function of human fear, greed, and apprehension all overlaid on a business cycle.” We […]
Some Less Familiar Investment Classics
Seth Klarman wrote in the introduction to his 1991 investment classic, Margin of Safety, “If interplanetary visitors landed on Earth and examined the workings of our financial markets and the behavior of financial-market participants, they would no doubt question the intelligence of the planet’s inhabitants.” Similar observations about investor irrationality have been made many times […]
Bye, Bye BRICS, Hello M-Pesa
As recently as 2007, China’s economy was growing at a 14.2% rate. India’s was expanding by 10.1%, Russia’s by 8.5% and Brazil’s by 6.1%. This year, developing economies as a group will be lucky to grow 5% according to a recently released World Bank report. The causes of this slowdown range from a tightening of […]
China: Royal Flush or House of Cards?
The International Comparison Program, a loose coalition of the world’s leading statistical agencies, recently reported that China will become the world’s largest economy this year based on purchasing power parity. PPP measures what money can actually buy. For instance, a hair cut in China is much less expensive than one in the U.S. When you […]
