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I’m keeping things short this week to get an early start to the upcoming holiday. No, that’s not code for camping out for Black Friday deals. It does mean no posts next week too. Things will get back to a regular schedule in December.
Have a great Thanksgiving everyone! Continue Reading…
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Slicing and dicing up indexes are what fund companies do best these days because most can’t compete with the low-cost leader in the industry. A new story is told, almost daily, about how you might make money or avoid losing money with some new fund – then you get charged an arm and leg for that narrative. And that is how fund companies try to create demand out of thin air.
The new yarn being spun is the need to avoid one specific sector in the market. To tell the tale, the fund company uses hindsight to weave its story. Continue Reading…
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Jeremy Siegel has done more work on historical stock returns than pretty much anyone. He literally wrote the book on it, pulling stock data going back to 1802 for Stocks for the Long Run.
In a recent Master in Business podcast interview he summed up his case for equities simply: Continue Reading…
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Business Insider has a write-up on the latest Baupost quarterly letter. There are several great quotes in the article on the Dotcom bubble, doing nothing, the importance of cash, and a little bit about their process.
I pulled a couple quotes below that describe what it was like being a value investor during the Dotcom crash. Continue Reading…
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If you want better than average returns you have to be different from everyone else. I’m poorly paraphrasing Howard Marks, but it’s true.
Behaving better than everyone else, buying when valuations are low, having a longer holding period, and becoming an expert are all simple ways to be different. Simple, but not easy.
Mario Gabelli has this figured out. He shared his investing philosophy in a recent interview: Continue Reading…
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In case you missed it, the latest Marks Memo (pdf) was released last Friday. It’s an homage to Yogi Berra specifically and sports generally. The comparison between sports and investing are used widely because it’s an analogy most of us can relate to on some level and the lessons learned tend to overlap.
Much like Buffett uses Ted Williams to explain his investment philosophy, Marks uses bits of Yogi, baseball, football, fantasy sports, and tennis to explain his. Continue Reading…