Market Timing, Valuation, and Systematic Purchases I have a lot of work to do but I’m sitting at my desk, the snow is on the ground outside, I have a fresh cup of coffee in front of me, and I don’t really feel like diving into my task list quite yet. This is going to…
A Night of Delicious Korean Food at Sobahn in Kansas City My youngest sister flew back from the East Coast tonight after being out there for roughly three weeks. My parents, Aaron, and I met her at the airport and then went out to a place called Sobahn, a well-rated Korean restaurant in Kansas City.…
Almost five years ago, Tiffany & Company was glittering at time when much of the corporate world was still mired in misery from devastating losses and the implosion of Wall Street. Based on the annual report for the prior year, 2010, worldwide net sales had risen by 12% on a constant-exchange-rate basis, reaching $3,085,290,000. After-tax profits were up 39% from the year before, 2009, when the developed world had gone through the worst meltdown since the Great Depression, coming in at $368,403,000.
One of the things that worries me from a risk management perspective is investors who don’t know what they own or their actual, real portfolio weightings. Sometimes, I’ll hear new investors say, “I own stocks” or “I own mutual funds” but neither is an answer. Those aren’t the relevant details. The real question: “In which enterprises, on what terms, and at what price has the money been invested, laid out, and exchanged?”. Much of everything else is a smokescreen serving to obfuscate reality. It’s risk-adjusted reward we’re after; reward measured in after-tax, net-of-inflation real purchasing power.
Mail Bag: What Is Something That Is an Instant Deal Breaker for You? Joshua, What is a trait or behavior that is an instant deal breaker for you or that can cause you to reevaluate a person negatively? [Redacted] For better or worse, each of us is influenced to some degree by our childhoods. No…
From August 2008 to June 2013, David Danon was an associate attorney in the tax department at the Vanguard Group. According to a whistleblower lawsuit filed with the State of New York, which served as the basis for additional whistleblower actions filed with the State of Texas, the State of California, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Internal Revenue Service, Danon was silenced, and ultimately sent packing, after he persistently warned management that Vanguard was committing massive tax abuse by using a combination of legal entities and improper pricing structure; an arrangement that went back 40 years. Danon claims that others who had raised similar concerns had also left the firm after facing a backlash for refusing to toe the line on what they believed was illegal behavior.
One of the major themes running through my body of work, both on this site and at Investing for Beginners, can be summed up in the statement, “Know your risks”. I hammer it home all the time; “risk-adjusted return”, talk about remote-probability events, explaining how much of wealth building is learning to “tilt probabilities in [your] favor”, admonishment to never invest in something you don’t fully understand and couldn’t explain to a Kindergartener in a couple of sentences. Consider this real-life tragedy a morality tale that can help you protect your own family.
Those of you who wish to read my writing at Investing for Beginners can now navigate my body of work much more easily thanks to a directory I built over the past week. It’s a productive copy for my own internal use as part of a planned upgrade project I’ll be doing in the coming year (as such, it…
Throughout your life and career, you are going to face many situations in which you are dissatisfied. Often, these situations will arise because of legitimate grievances you have about a person, behavior, policy, or system. There are a few strategies that, used judiciously, can exponentially increase your effectiveness.
After making the rum raisin ice cream recipe, we decided to try our hands at a white chocolate ice cream recipe, which used whole eggs (rather than egg yolks), a 1/3rd increase in the heavy-cream-to-whole-milk ratio, left out the brown sugar, granulated sugar, and salt, and a few other tweaks in terms of the order in which the ingredients were assembled.