You may have heard that investing should be a completely emotion-less endeavor: that it’s more of a science than art, and that you should stick to a system. I think that’s all true, but it’s easier said than done. Emotions have no place in investing, but the fact is that they’re there anyway. Why does […]
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Twitter Hack and Flash Crash – Should You Care?
You might find the AP hacking story interesting and curious, but as a long term investor, you probably shouldn’t care. Yes, the Dow fell 140 points (temporarily), but who cares? Day traders and floor traders may care, but many of them would have been just fine if they were taking a nap during all the […]
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What Does Your 401k Statement Tell You?
Hint: it’s not what you need to know. It may be tempting to look at your 401k account, especially when markets go haywire. Before you do that, you may want to ask what you’re looking for. If it’s just idle curiosity and you have some time to kill, there’s nothing wrong with looking at your […]
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Happy Anniversary!
You forgot? This is the one year anniversary of the market lows of March 2009. The greatest bear market of most of our lifetimes, and hopefully it’ll stay that way. From October of 2007 to March of 2009, the “stock market” lost almost 60% and some investors lost a lot more. Do you remember March […]
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Did You Rebalance?
As we reach a new quarter, this is a time when many choose to rebalance. You also hear about mutual funds changing their holdings for “window dressing” (or making it look like they only own good stuff). So, what did you do during the recent financial crisis? Did you rebalance when your stock allocation shrunk […]
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Investments are Not Like People’s Lives
An interesting way to think of Investments is that they are not like people’s lives. When you see investment values heading down, as you may have seen recently, you may assume that they’ll continue heading in that direction. The same was true when investment values went up, right? “House prices never go down“. “I don’t […]