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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…
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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.
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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When I originally made the tables, I purposely limited the international and emerging market tables to the 12 biggest countries by market cap.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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2017 has been a ho-hum year for the markets. Yes, returns were great all around. A quick glance at Morningstar’s Index Performance shows a sea of green YTD. But…
The juxtaposition of a volatile political environment and a carefree market best sums up 2017. If you ever wanted proof that markets are apolitical, this was it. I’ll spare you my political hot take (I’m way too cynical anyway).
The markets, however, are open season.
Barring some cataclysmic event, 2017 will go down as the least volatile year in market history. And the market will end the year very positive – the S&P 500 is up 21% so far (international and emerging markets stocks saw an equally great year). Continue Reading…
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Every year I’m surprised by the posts that get traction and those that don’t. What I think is interesting and spend a lot of time on, can fall flat while something that seems like an afterthought, gets shared everywhere. I doubt I’ll ever figure it out, but I do appreciate it when it happens. So thank you for reading…and sharing.
Like last year, I dedicated most of 2017 to sharing what I dug up and read in books, articles, and interviews of some of the brighter minds in finance.
So what was read the most?
It’s no surprise that articles on the most recognizable investor’s today were the most popular. The lessons from those posts revolve around decision making. Continue Reading…
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With 2017 coming to a close, the forecast machine is working overtime predicting what will happen next year. “The wackier the better” is how the game works because it draws the biggest headlines.
Unfortunately, these people sound sincere, educated, and expert-y, so we’re more apt to believe them.
Don’t.
A magic eight ball is about as useful as the people spewing these predictions. So take it all with a heaping pile of salt. Like the magic eight ball, view it as purely entertainment.
The exception is the outlook reports looking beyond 2018 that take a long-term probabilistic approach. Vanguard – which does a better job than most – released their outlook this week. Continue Reading…
