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  • Happy Hour: Latest Marks Memo on Weighing the Risk

    January 26, 2018

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    Jon

    Howard Marks is out with a new Memo this week. He offers his view on where the market’s stand today and a lengthy discussion on the impact of the tax cuts.

    The short version on tax cuts is it’s short-term positive, long-term negative – mostly good for businesses, but for individuals it depends. He covers some second-order consequences for the tax in general and the new state and local tax deduction limit specifically. It’s worth reading through.

    The rest of the memo is spent reviewing things he’s repeated the last few years. So if you’ve read any Memos the last couple years, it will sound familiar: Continue Reading…


  • Howard Marks: The Importance of Second-Level Thinking

    January 24, 2018

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    Jon

    Howard Marks on Second-Level Thinking
    Charlie Ellis once gave a speech in which he related the three ways to beat the market. You can be smarter than everyone else, you can outwork everyone else, or you can behave better than everyone else.

    It turns out none of those are easy.

    A lot of investors try to outwork the next person without realizing that all the other next persons are trying to do the same thing.

    And the trouble with being smarter than everyone else is that nobody looks or feels smarter until after the fact. The smartest investors tend to do things that nobody else is doing and often seem wrong at the time. Continue Reading…


  • Happy Hour: Opposing View

    January 19, 2018

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    Jon

    There’s a difference between crypto-currencies and blockchain. Keeping the two separate is important.

    One – the blockchain – is a technology. It may or may not be the next best thing since sliced bread. Mass adoption is not guaranteed and if it is, it will take time. It could follow the path of the internet. Or it could be the next Segway or Betamax or Laserdisc…you get the point. It’s too early to tell but that’s what makes it interesting.

    The other – the coins – is a means of exchange. The coins may or may not be a necessary part of the technology (companies are using the blockchain without the coins).

    Until that’s settled, it’s being used to gamble and speculate in. People see the prices going up really fast, see other people making a killing, get caught up in the enthusiasm, and “invest” because they want to get theirs. They’re not doing research, don’t understand the technology behind it, or why a certain coin was created. They hear about a new coin offering and buy it at X, hoping to sell it later for 20X or 100X. But this only works if prices always rise (they don’t). Continue Reading…


  • Happy Hour: Quantity over Quality

    January 12, 2018

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    Jon

    You may or may not know this but Warren Buffett once made a small fortune investing in crappy companies. He then used part of that small fortune to buy a controlling interest in a crappy company and turned it into a conglomerate.

    That story gets retold in some form every time Buffett or Charlie Munger sit in front of an audience. Which is exactly what Munger did in an interview a few months ago: Continue Reading…


  • Happy Hour: Melt-Up

    January 5, 2018

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    Jon

    The coolest thing I saw this week was a new resource by Barclays showing the CAPE ratio for 26 countries.

    U.S. CAPE data has been freely available for some time but I’ve yet to find historical CAPE data for other countries.

    The Barclays chart offers a nice visual of the data by country.

     

    Barclays CAPE chart - U.S. vs Europe Continue Reading…


  • 2017: A Year in Returns

    January 3, 2018

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    Jon

    The asset tables are officially updated with the total returns for 2017. Before we get to the numbers, I made a few changes to two of the tables.

    When I originally made the tables, I purposely limited the international and emerging market tables to the 12 biggest countries by market cap. It was cleaner, easier to manage, and fit on most screens. It also left out about half the countries in the MSCI EAFE and EM indexes.

    So it was time for a makeover.

    I remade both tables over the holiday break to include every country in the index – with a new color scheme – with data for the past 15 years. All the countries in the MSCI EAFE are included. Two of the MSCI EM countries didn’t make the cut – Qatar and United Arab Emirates – because neither has 15 years of data. Continue Reading…


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