The nations’ largest retail chains made their fortunes by appealing to the human desire for a bargain. Entering the store, the first items you see are usually the ones on sale. And people rush to buy them. Wall Street has a sale rack too but often many investors try to avoid it, oddly preferring to…
During my early years living in Canada, I adopted the tradition of playing marbles on the playground at the first sign of Spring. Marbles was a game but also serious business. Marbles were our currency. We collected them, traded them and invented numerous games to win them from each other. The social hierarchy in my…
I want to follow up on my recent column regarding cryptocurrencies, and for the purposes here I will call them all, Bitcoin. Given the rising popularity of this new asset I feel there are a few things people should know before making a decision. Let’s begin with how you might actually own it. Bitcoin ownership is…
What is risk? The dictionary defines it as the possibility of loss. Sports fans understand risk. Even the best teams lose games. When the Tampa Bay Buccaneers won Super Bowl LV this year, no one complained that they had lost 31% of their regular season games. It is the final result, not the occasional losses…
The flight from our California office takes me on a route travelled daily by thousands of others. Last week while enroute I was alerted to a Gulfstream G3 jet passing above me. I was flying my normal 300 mph but the G3 was doing closer to 500. I watched the gap between myself and the…
A few years ago, one of my sons who has always been very tech oriented introduced me to Bitcoin, which was trading for about $10 at the time. I felt his pain as he struggled to teach this “baby boomer” about the new digital technology which he insisted was going to flood the earth. In…
When I was 15, I spent a summer living at my cousin’s house working for a local farmer. Farm work is hard but the task that was particularly difficult for me, on an emotional level, was when he sent us out to thin the peach trees. We climbed ladders up into the trees loaded with…
In the Bible a conflicted Pontius Pilate posed the question, “What is Truth?” Those three words sum up much of the human experience. The year 2020 will be remembered as an often-heated battle to find truth. The virus response, racial tension and numerous areas of political debate deeply divided our nation. With each declaring the…
In the mid 1950’s a mutual fund family was approached by a convent of nuns who had a couple million dollars to invest. Because of their religious beliefs, they didn’t want any of their money supporting businesses involved in the sale of alcohol, tobacco, or gambling. The fund family had no existing offerings that qualified…
As we move further into 2021 and see the policies of the new administration unfold, it will be good for investors to keep a close eye on the intended, and perhaps more importantly, the unintended consequences of the various actions. One of the Biden administration’s stated policy goals is to revoke the Trump tax cuts and…