“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” -Richard Feynman When stocks fall 20%, investors start asking questions. This demand is met with an endless supply of people happy to provide them with answers. There will be no shortage of people claiming that they nailed the past…
A Few Charts and a Few More Thoughts
“Every past decline looks like an opportunity, every future decline looks like a risk.” – Morgan Housel Another day where the feeling of risk overwhelms the prospects of opportunity. The chart below shows all the times that the S&P 500 declined by at least 1% over 4 consecutive sessions. This has occurred at bottoms (2002,…
Animal Spirits Talk Your Book: Breaking the Cap
Today’s Animal Spirits Talk Your Book is brought to you by Exponential ETFs On today’s Animal Spirits Talk Your Book we discuss: Are some stocks too big to succeed? It’s relatively easy to beat the market Do stocks outperform treasury bills? Is the S&P 500 the world’s largest momentum strategy? (no) But it is the…
A Few Charts and a Few Thoughts
The NASDAQ 100 just had its worst week since 2008. Every stock in the index finished in the red. Twenty-one fell at least 10%. There wasn’t a single -2% day in the S&P 500 from October 2016 through January 2018. There have been 7 over the last 60 sessions Something interesting has been going on…
These Are the Goods
Articles Two to three times more would be perfect. By Josh Brown We will be less wrong By Corey Hoffstein People who are rich just can’t accept that fact. If you’re rich, you can buy a lot of things, but on average you can’t buy above-average performance. By Jason Zweig The most successful active funds…
Surveying the Damage
As is usually the case, most stocks are doing worse than the index. While the S&P 500 is mired in a 15% drawdown (as of yesterday’s close), the median stock is 23.5% below its 52-week high. Looking within the S&P 500 (as of yesterday’s close, data from YCharts), things have gotten ugly out there. There are…
Where We’re Going
Below are the total annual returns for the S&P 500 over the past nine calendar years. Nine consecutive years of calendar gains is terrific, but I don’t feel any comfort in writing this so I doubt you feel any comfort in reading it I could show you a million stats about how accommodating the market…
Animal Spirits: Everyone Should Be Earning 3%
On today’s Animal Spirits, we discuss: Robinhood goes after banks with 3% checking and savings accounts… …Oh wait, nevermind Yea, nevermind Student loans are twice as much as all outstanding credit card debt Never list Are You Ready for the Financial Crisis of 2019? A good Twitter thread People are waking up ridiculously early Listen…
Next Year
Ben Graham once said, “Nearly everyone interested in common stocks wants to be told by someone else what he thinks the market is going to do. The demand being there, it must be supplied.” Over the weekend, Barron’s obliged. As is always the case, strategists see stocks going higher next year, with the average price…
Animal Spirits Talk Your Book: International Investing
Today’s Animal Spirits Talk Your Book is presented by iShares On today’s episode, we discuss: Is market cap weighting really sub-optimal? Can factor investing replace old-school active management? Why should investors bother diversifying internationally? S&P envy. Structuring a multi-factor portfolio. Finding unicorn stocks in a multi-factor model. The problem with single variable analysis. Constraining a…
