Stocks gained 6% in the first 22 sessions of 2018. In the last two, they gave it all back, and then some. This is what Aristotle meant when he said “stocks take the stairs up and the elevator down.” The simplest explanation for the way markets move is this: Rising prices attract buyers and falling…

Articles When 120 of the Commodore’s descendants gathered at Vanderbilt University in 1973 for the first family reunion, there was not a millionaire among them. By Nick Maggiulli People should read more history and fewer forecasts By Morgan Housel Mean-reversion based arguments are tricky. Use with caution. By Sri Thiruvadanthai None of it serves as…

After getting off to a blistering start in 2018, stocks cooled off this week, with the S&P 500 falling 3.85%, its worst weekly decline since January 2016. The extended period of calm that we’ve grown accustomed to is over. The S&P 500 had been within 3% of an all-time high- even on an intra-day basis-…

Ben came out of a fog machine at his speech in Italy.  U.S. Stocks Surge Back Toward Bubble Territory. January 2010! Even if you knew what earnings would be next year… A fair value P/E ratio of 15 makes more sense The pool of money that’s sitting in cash worldwide has never been greater. There’s…

What will the headlines and articles be like if the S&P 500 goes flat on the year? If this were to happen, the index will be in a 6.45% drawdown. It’s easy to forget how normal this is when something that happens all the time hasn’t happened in a very long time. As you can…

“Markets may be crazy, but this does not make you a psychiatrist.” -Meir Statman There are plenty of stories and anecdotes about how crazy markets can be, and I’m about to share one, but when we see these stories, it’s helpful to keep that Meir Statman quote in the back of your mind. This story from Chaos Monkeys about the Goldman Sachs…

Articles At Amazon Go, checking out feels like — there’s no other way to put it — shoplifting By Nick Wingfield Investing ultimately requires a nuanced relationship to fear and greed. By Graham Duncan Reaching for your smartphone has become our default action By Tadas Viskanta The irony of history is that it’s mostly the…

Finally. A day where the S&P 500 gained 1%. And with it, a streak was broken. The past few months have been unusual, as usual. It’s been a slow, long grind higher without any sort of buying panic. *Warning, if you don’t like cherry-picked data, this is your chance to leave. The last positive 1%…

It has been a tough decade for value investors. Over the last ten years, it’s trailed growth to the largest extent since the inflating of the dot-com bubble. The chart below shows that the Value stocks, as represented by the Russell 1000 Value Index, have underperformed growth stocks over the last ten years by 61%. I…

Amazon gained 56% in 2017. Google gained 33%. Apparently that wasn’t enough. Year-to-date they’ve tacked on another 12.5% and 10.6% respectively, adding a combined $147,782,647,497 in market capitalization. Amazon’s market cap was $70 billion in 2011. It just added the equivalent amount in fourteen days. That’s bigger than Colgate-Palmolive and General Motors and Marriott and…