July 2015

Breadth and Major Market Tops

Conventional wisdom goes that prior to market tops, the major averages become more reliant on just a handful of stocks to lead the rally. When stocks are making new highs, it’s important to look at breadth indicators because indices can pull a nasty trick of masking what is actually happening to the majority of stocks….

How Should We Think About Past Performance?

Show people the following chart and one hundred percent will choose to invest in the blue line. The blue line represents the Russell 2000 Value Index and the red line is the Russell 2000 Growth Index. The problem with long term charts like these, especially for the laymen, is that this greatly oversimplifies things. The…

The Challenge of Long-Term Investing

Barry’s Masters in Business series keeps getting better and better. A few weeks back he spoke with Leon Cooperman, and more recently he interviewed the brilliant Howard Marks. When a Marks memo hits Warren Buffett’s inbox, he reads it immediately. That’s the sort of thinker the founder of Oaktree Capital is. Howard Marks has been…

How Much Does Experience Matter?

There is a great scene in Moneyball where legendary scout Grady Fuson and Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane are talking about the evolution of the game. Fuson is from the old school and thinks there are some things numbers just can’t tell you that intuition can. There are a lot of parallels between sports…

What You Need to Know About the 200-Day Moving Average

On Monday, for the first time since October 2014, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed beneath its 200-day moving average. Many people wonder what the implications for this might be. Do stocks bounce right here and if so, how long can we expect them to hold? The truth is that speculating on where they go…