A lot has been happening on the Korean Peninsula, both North and South. In our March newsletter we covered the impeachment of South Korea’s former president Park Geun-hye and public fury over political corruption. Since then, former President Park has been arrested; the first liberal South Korean president in a decade, Moon Jae-in, has been […]
Julie Won
The 2-Minute Thought: The Best Way for Individual Investors to Compete
Individual investors often forget that active investment is a competition. It is you against the person on the other side of the trade. If you are buying, you should always be thinking about what the seller knows that you don’t. Michael Mauboussin and his colleagues Dan Callahan and Darius Majd at Credit Suisse wrote as […]
The 2-Minute Thought The Distance Between North and South Koreans
Every five years, the East Asia Institute surveys South Koreans on whether they view North Korea as “one of us,” “a brother,” “a neighbor,” “an enemy” or “other.” In 2005, 51% of South Koreans said they saw North Korea as “a brother” while only 15% selected “enemy.” But by 2015, 41% of South Koreans said […]
The 2-Minute Thought: Learning to Listen Better
People are terrible listeners. An oft-cited statistic is that we spend 60% of conversation time listening to others but can only remember 25% of what is said. In an article on what they call the “Plateau Effect,” Bob Sullivan and Hugh Thompson wrote that half the adults asked to sit through a 10-minute oral presentation […]
Is There Free Money in Closed-End Funds?…
One of the great unanswered questions in the field of investments is why closed-end mutual funds can trade at a persistent discount to their net asset value. This is the famous “closed-end fund puzzle” — what Burton Malkiel of Random Walk fame once called “one of the most enduring conundrums in the field of finance.” […]
The 2-Minute Thought: Where Do Great Investment Ideas Come From?
When experienced investors are asked where they get their ideas, they often say voracious reading or careful screening of companies for characteristics they like – or both. But there is wide variety in what they read – and widely divergent attitudes toward screening. Other sources of ideas include company visits, building expertise in obscure fields […]
The 2-Minute Thought: Does the Dwindling Number of U.S Stocks Matter?
In a recent paper called “The Incredible Shrinking Universe of Stocks,” Michael Mauboussin, Dan Callahan, and Darius Majd at Credit Suisse delve into why there has been such a sharp drop in the number of publicly traded stocks in the U.S. This is a U.S. phenomenon. In developed markets outside the U.S., the number of […]
The 2-Minute Thought: Hope for Europe
Suddenly, people are talking positively about Europe again. How fickle we are. Since the Great Recession, European stocks have underperformed those in the U.S., and the eurozone has been sieged by crisis and gloom. In contrast, the U.S. has been a star – and especially since the election, we haven’t been able to stop talking […]
The 2-Minute Thought: Tough, demanding, empowered consumers
In last weekend’s Financial Times, Tyler Brûlé wrote, “Ten years ago, Slippers the cat used to have a choice of fish or chicken out of a tin. Today Slippers (if she’s still with us) can have vegetarian mousse with salmon aroma sprayed on top. Her owners can have it delivered before they leave for work, […]
Now What?…
If you’ve been following the news from South Korea, you might say that truth indeed is stranger than fiction. In fact, you really couldn’t make up this stuff if you tried. Starting last fall and culminating in the impeachment last week of former President Park Geun-Hye (pictured), there has been a series of bizarre stories […]
The 2-Minute Thought: Millennial Risk Aversion
Japan’s risk aversion is famous: There’s the devotion to saving in accounts yielding close to zero rather than spending or investing in stocks. There are the perennial poor rankings in global surveys on entrepreneurialism. There is the fact that relatively few Japanese students choose to study abroad compared to those in other nations. Several years […]
The 2-Minute Thought: Becoming Fluent. . . in Flemish, Vietnamese, or Another Language
It’s a long journey to learn a foreign language. You go from hearing speech as a stream of unintelligible sound to eventually being able to identify distinct units of meaning. You start to use those units in your own speech, but find yourself bumping up against new limitations even as your expressive power grows. Children […]
