Global markets have sold off pretty hard to start the week.  Most of the narrative surrounds the Chinese property market and one of their largest developers, Evergrande.  China’s government is clamping down on leverage and demanding many industries to buy in, literally, to their social objectives via cash “donations”, cheaper housing, etc.  Both the Shanghai...Read More

The news about Coronavirus continues to get substantially better.  The CDC updated its infection fatality rate (IFR) estimate to 0.26%.  This means that, if one is infected, they have a 0.26% chance of dying.  Initial estimates hovered around 1.5-3%, which shows how drastically wrong they were.  Now clearly one has a higher chance of death...Read More

Benjamin Graham (the founder of value investing) originally came up with the concept of margin of safety.  The idea is to buy a security at a large enough discount to its true worth, that you can greatly reduce your chances of losses, while also maintaining a maximum profit potential.  To determine intrinsic value, one uses...Read More

We had a feeling Monday would be bad and boy, did it deliver with the stock market dropping by nearly 8%, now down 19% in just 13 trading sessions.  The Oil and Gas Exploration and Production ETF was down 37% today alone!  This market selloff is now bigger than what we saw in late 2018,...Read More

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]After Monday’s bloodbath, we have now had the 26th correction greater than 5% since the March 2009 low.  This table above shows them, and it is important to note that they all felt like very serious deals when they were occurring, but many of them seem very forgettable at this point. Monday’s 3% selloff marked...Read More

Over the weekend, reports have come about that the Coronavirus has been spreading quite a bit outside of China.  New clusters have formed in Italy, South Korea, Iran, Israel, etc.  One concern is that they are having a tough time figuring out how they got the virus, as many hadn’t been to China recently.  The...Read More

Fears of the Coronavirus have caused bonds to rally, resulting in lower interest rates once again.  The Tech Bubble has continued to grow, while value stocks have been left in the dust the last few months.  While this can be frustrating over the short-term, over the long-term, it creates compelling opportunities to create substantial wealth....Read More

2020 is shaping up to be a strange year.  This Coronavirus has a region in China, far larger in population than New York city, on a complete lock-down.  There are zombie cruise ships patrolling the waters in a state of full quarantine, with no countries wanting to take the risk of allowing them in to...Read More

There has been a tremendous amount of news over the last few weeks with the phase 1 trade deal with China, progress on the successor to NAFTA, and the Tories winning in the UK by a wide margin.  We don’t want to overthink individual political or economic data-points, which is a mistake that far too many...Read More

Historically, it has made reasonable sense for retirees to have a sizable allocation to bonds.  A minimum of 40% was certainly not uncommon.  The logic behind this was that retirees regularly draw from their accounts and are less comfortable with the enhanced volatility that stocks can at times provide.  The supposedly steady income from the...Read More