Happy Recession Anniversary

A couple weeks ago I read an interesting article in Smart Money entitled Lessons from the Crash.  While the specifics of the story were geared towards those given to single stock investing, it was more the premise that caught my imagination. The set up was the top 5 lessons investors have learned over the past 12 months, the spiritual if not literal anniversary of the downturn. So that got me to...

You Are What Your Record Says You Are

The title is a quote from Super Bowl winning coach Bill Parcells. The idea is that a team is as good or as bad as its record indicate.  Fans, commentators, and even players like to interpret – or rationalize – circumstances and game events so as to suggest that a team is better, or sometimes worse, than its record might suggest.  A lucky bounce here or a bad call there and those close losses...

Lessons from the Great Depression

“The Biggest Recession since the Great Depression” seems to be a favored storyline and the media has certainly had its fun with the premise.  Yet so much of it is tired and breathless drivel. But featured in the May issue of Smart Money is a smartly correlated discussion of the then and now. The idea is simple and elegant and seemingly impossible:  Find former brokers that actually...

House Keeping Edition

Hey guys, I really should have held my recent Link Round-up post because as I cleaned out my magazine bin Sunday afternoon I crossed paths with a couple items that I also wanted to share and comment on with you. Oh well, that’s the beauty of the blog format - it’s all free form.  So here are some additional random items:  I just participated in my initial Blog Carnival – the...