Investors, You Get What You Pay For

My mom loved root beer. Before she passed away a year ago at age 93, she wanted a McDonalds’ hamburger and a root beer. It was about that time that some of the kids and I stumbled upon a website that sold what they called, “Vintage Sodas.” One of the collections they offered was a…

 Are you financially unprepared?

At the age of 7, I decided I wanted to play baseball. I was living in beautiful Yorba Linda, California, and in my town, baseball was life. I was a little nervous as I watched games at the local ballfield because I was one of the smallest kids my age. In fact, in thinking back…

That Cursed Volatility

A visitor to my office asked if I thought the stock market was still a good place to invest given all its “recent volatility.” This frequent question carries with it the inference that there was once a time when the stock market was not volatile. When I first became serious about investing the Dow Jones…

Know When to Turn over the Keys

One of my friends is a former fighter pilot. He loves to fly but as he got older it became clear to others that his skills were diminishing. Finally, his children made the very unpopular decision to take away the keys to his plane. He was initially very unhappy and it caused a significant amount…

Break the Financial Accident Chain

In our office we have been discussing our biggest concerns for investors in 2024. One of the topics of discussion has been the continuing growth of financial scams. Criminals keep getting more clever and bolder. New technologies are also making it easier for them to fool and scam people. Every year we need to add…

Why is the stock market going up?

The major stock market averages have been climbing recently. Given all the challenges in the world, people keep asking why the market seems so happy. Inflation and interest rates remain stubbornly high while corporate profits, measured by PE ratios, are largely flat — so why all the excitement?  The first thing to understand is that…

We can learn a lot from Trees

In our prior home we had some huge pecan trees in our yard. Pecans are beautiful trees during the summer, but when they drop their leaves in the fall they look like they have died. Throughout the winter they make the yard appear quite gloomy. One day as I wandered about the pile of leaves…

Can You Fly the Plane?

At a recent convention our company set up a booth and in it we displayed an FAA certified flight simulator. We invited visitors to take a turn at flying a mock landing, challenging them with the question, “Can you Fly the Plane?” Our booth attracted a lot of attention as many people tried, though relatively…