Underfunded SEC

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jan 27, 2009 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 2 comments The head of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Linda Thomsen, testified before Congress today about her group’s handling of the Bernard Madoff Ponzi-scheme scandal. Particularly noteworthy is her having said, “While we appreciate and examine every lead we receive, we simply do not have the resources to fully investigate them all.” I have stated several...
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What is real economic growth?

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jan 17, 2009 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 3 comments Happy Saturday to all of you out there!   Today’s post is a missive as to what qualifies as real economic growth. This may sound like a very dry topic, but having a handle on this actually then gives you a powerful tool for evaluating the health of any country’s gross domestic product (GDP) – alias, an economy.   This, in turn, allows you to accurately assess the...
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Dividends, part III

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Dec 16, 2008 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 4 comments I don’t know where you are while you are reading Our Little Corner of the Internet, but the weather outside is frightful here in Santa Fe…brrrr…and there is lots of snow…and since we’ve no place to go…then let the Blog flow! OK, so I didn’t miss my calling as a poet. Before getting to the third part of the dividends post I wanted to tell you that I...
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Dividends, part II

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Dec 15, 2008 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 4 comments I apologize to those of you who were expecting part II of the dividends post on Friday and it was not forthcoming. I ended up not having Internet access on Friday. So without further adieu…part deux. So now you know that dividends are definitively a good thing, yes? That begs the question, “How do you find companies that pay reliable dividends?” The first step is to become...
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Dividends, part I, addendum

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Dec 15, 2008 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 2 comments Hello everyone, I hope that each of you had an excellent weekend. A quick addendum to the first posting about dividends. So I think I made a pretty good case that dividends are desirable. They are cold, hard cash return to investors. Because of that fact then you as an investor can deploy that cash in whatever fashion you so desire. However, another advantage of dividends as a source of return...
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Dividends, part I

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Dec 11, 2008 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments I have decided to move a question from the comments section to the main blog because of its importance. Here we are talking about dividends, and thanks to Gary, who asked. When investing in a financial asset (e.g. stock, preferred stock, bond, money market, mutual fund, etc.) there are two ways to make money: capital gains and income. Capital gains are when the value of your investment rises in...
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price earnings ratio primer

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Nov 20, 2008 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments   In today’s post I wanted to share with you the results from one of my favorite tools that I developed during my career as a professional money manager. It was a spreadsheet that took me several days to create that analyzed the financial implications of P/E ratios. Folks bandy about P/E ratios without necessarily understanding what they mean for long-term returns. In case some of you...
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