I strive to be smart, wise, analytical, creative, intuitive, and informative. I hope to help make you a better active investment management pro.
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staying in touch
Hello everyone! Thanks for the positive feedback via e-mail – keep it coming. Also, please feel free to post comments to my posts. This blog is no soapbox – I am interested in dialogue. Monologue doesn’t serve any of us. Also, if you would like to be able to receive automatic notifications of postings then become a “follower” of the blog using the tool in the upper right hand corner of the blog. Jason
read moreadvice I learned the very hard way
The markets are clearly crashing. The overwhelming preponderance of folks want out of the stock market. Fear reigns supreme. What can we do about this? Each of my previous posts has been a lead up to this post where I hope to provide each of you out there with actionable advice. The first thing to remember is that all of investing boils down to four very simple words. Yes, only four words: “buy low, sell high.” Stock prices are obviously very low right now and many of you may be thinking, “I have some cash and I should...
read morea simple analogy
Let me share with you an analogy that I think illuminates what is going on in the economy right now. If the economy is a body, then money is the blood circulating through that body, and financial institutions are the heart pumping the blood through the body. Right now the overall body is very healthy and there is plenty of blood to be pumped through the body. But the problem is that the heart is refusing to pump the blood. This is leading to an atrophying body. So the question is why is the heart refusing to pump? The leaders of financial...
read morethe solid foundation underneath
I know that many of us are having a difficult time mustering faith in our economy. With your permission I would like to talk about the solid foundation lying underneath the economy. In order to do that though I need to make sure that each of us understands what the economy really represents. For most of us, the economy is a very abstract thing and if asked to define it I feel that most of us would have difficulty in describing it. I am a big believer in boiling things down to their simplest components, so here goes. The economy is a...
read moreincentives fleshed out
Last post I discussed the importance of incentives for helping to change behavior and I would like to expand on that a little bit today. Today’s extraordinarily excessive exec pay packages have a very skewed sense of reward. You frequently hear justification for these enormous dollar awards along the lines of, “Well the head of the ABC Corp. has very large responsibility and therefore, his pay compensates him for that.” Well originally it was salary that was supposed to compensate an executive for the responsibilities and...
read moreethics are an economic issue
I forgot to mention in my initial post that ethics are an economic issue. If you have any doubt as to that fact then simply look at the $700 billion price tag of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. Consider that large dollar amount as a debit in the ethical accounting system. Still don’t believe it? Have you heard that the Dearly Departed CEO of Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld, made nearly half a billion dollars since the year 2000? Not bad for a guy who steered his company into the ground over those 8 years. Furthermore, the...
read morethe “financial crisis” is really an ethical crisis
For my first post I wanted to excerpt an e-mail that I wrote back on September 30, 2008 because it serves as a good background for today’s post… “I am opposed to any bailout bill for a number of reasons: The crisis confronting the U.S. right now is not a financial crisis, but an ethical crisis. The ethic in question here is a total lack of self-responsibility that pervades our culture at lots of levels, from Wall Street hedge funds to the credit-card-maxed-out Midwesterner. The only way for people to be cured of these sorts...
read more6 October 2008: The Blog is LIVE!
Because so many of my friends and my family have asked me to answer their questions at this very difficult time in U.S. financial markets history, I have begun a blog. I hope that this resource proves to be invaluable and helps to steady the nerves of folks.
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