As a financial advisor and a pilot, I consider myself a good risk manager but I can’t hold a candle to my wife. She has given birth to seven children. She told me that if you can survive pregnancy and childbirth, you can do anything. I believe it. With each child I have seen Launa…
An investor came to me for advice this week saying, “I spend all day long watching every show, joining every webcast and following every analyst I can find, and I’m still confused and don’t know what to do.” I responded that if I did the same thing, I wouldn’t know what to do either. I get…
Not long ago I wrote that according to statistics from the Department of Labor, over half of all financial advisors had never experienced a bear market first-hand. I can safely set that statistic aside now. This crisis has been quite an education for investors and their advisors. Based on some younger financial advisors who have…
My copy of the masterpiece, Dante’s Inferno, is in Italian, so I will attempt to translate into English the sign that hung above the gates of hell in that poem. It said, “Leave behind all hope, you who enter here.” To Dante, the loss of hope was the loss of everything. I thought of that poem…
As of this writing, the DOW average has just climbed through 22,000 on hopes of a massive government stimulus package. The stock market is acting like the crisis is over. Just a couple weeks ago investors panicked as the DOW average was falling through that same number. It is a testament to the irrational emotions…