May 2018

What Are Your Thoughts On?

Like a lot of other people, I shorted GameStop in 2012. At one point that year, shorts controlled 75% of the float! But the stock went on a crazy sick run from August to November, gaining 250% and forcing a lot of people like myself to cover. I don’t remember exactly where I sold and…

Animal Spirits: Stocks Are Not Bonds

On this week’s Animal Spirits, we discussed: My dad has $1.8 million dollars worth of GE Is there alpha in small cap stocks? The myth of 1926 The marshmallow test.  Separating the ingredients and the recipe.  Lessons from the past 25 years The financial health of millennials  What’s going on with ESPN? What’s going on…

How About Now?

Matt Bertuzzi sent me a link to this Reddit discussion last night. My dad has $1.8 million dollars worth of GE. What should he do? This is roughly 90% of his stock portfolio. I warned him to diversify a few years back, but he’s held the stock for years and is quite stubborn :). He is…

These Are the Goods

Articles If you keep written journals, there is simply no way to let hindsight bias take over, for there, in your own hand, is what you thought about something at the time, with revisions through selective memory impossible. By Jim O’Shaughnessy The ingredients are the signals that are used to select investments.  The recipe is the…

Never Begin With the End in Mind

The thing about biases is that they’re human, so they’re seen in every walk of life. In who we choose to be friends with, in what news we read, in investing, and in sports. In Michael Lombardi’s new book Gridiron Genius, which I highly recommend, he talks about all of the biases that can infect a…

Animal Spirits: What it Takes to Be Wealthy

On this week’s Animal Spirits, we discuss: Jack Bogle’s battle… …All hedge funds are not bad Active vs passive? Yes. Again? Yes.  Thinking outside the box What happened to Einhorn No really, what happened? Buyer beware Another athlete got ripped off by his advisor By 35 years old… How much money do you need to…

Do Long-Term Investors Need (Long-Term) Bonds?

A reader asked Ben: If the goal is long-term investing (let us say I will not look at this money for the next 15 years), then does it still make sense to invest in bonds since equities outperform bonds over a long period of time? I would agree with Ben’s thoughts, which is that the…

On Second Thought…

In 1965, AT&T and General Motors represented 14.5% of the S&P 500. Today, the top five names, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Facebook make up less than that. The percent of market cap made up by the ten largest names was cut in half from 1962-1980, and has held steady for the better part of…

A Different Game

This weekend I listened to Bill Simmons interview Lou Adler, a long-time Lakers season ticket holder. They cover a lot of ground and at one point they talk about Kareem going down in the 1979-1980 finals. This was a devastating injury. Kareem was the best player in the league and was averaging 32 points and…

These Are the Goods

Articles The latest embarrassment for a former star who has not bested the stock market since 2009. By Michelle Celarier The passage of time has also dimmed the memories of the pain of the crisis, such that most investors seem to believe they would stay the course through another such crisis, whether or not they…