I haven’t written a Bulls vs. Bears post in a while. Given the tremendous stock market run from the end of last year through the end of the first quarter of this year, it seems like a good time to assess the current position of the markets. I recently read two articles which, on the…
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking. ~J.K. Galbraith A recent article in the Globe and Mail delivered the following advice to investors: Don’t Let a Fear of Bonds Infect Your Healthy Portfolio. The implications are clear: 1. Concerns about ultra-low interest rates eventually turning higher are overblown. 2….
Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. ~William Hazlitt If you believe the opening quote, we are in for some great lessons – at least according to Felix Zulauf of Zulauf Asset Management in Switzerland. The transcript of a recent interview with him was published by McAlvany Weekly Commentary. It is optimistically entitled…
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. Teach a man to create an artificial shortage of fish and he will eat steak. ~Jay Leno Today’s quote illustrates why it’s so hard to invest in markets. There are so…
Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it’s addressed to someone else. ~Ivern Ball Market and economic commentary over the past few months has contained numerous references to walls. Setting aside the irony of the fact that the seat of American capitalism rests on Wall Street, we’ve also heard…
The following is Part Two of a two-part guest post from Rob Bennett. The first part (How to Use Valuation-Informed Indexing – Part One) was published on Monday. (Schedule Note: I will be taking Friday off, so there won’t be a new post until Monday.) The valuation metric (P/E10 — the price of an index…
The following is Part One of a two-part guest post from Rob Bennett. I asked Rob a couple of questions in a comment the other day and he was kind enough to answer them in the form of these two articles. My thanks to him for taking the time to do this. I found this…
Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish. ~John Quincy Adams Inflation has been in the headlines a lot lately. Many point to food price spikes as a key factor in the eruption of bloody protests in the Middle East and North Africa. Instability in these regions has only…
