Most of the mail bag questions come from letters submitted through the contact form, on Facebook, through About.com, etc. But every once in awhile, I’ll elevate a question submitted in the comments section of an article to a mail bag post if I think the response might be useful to others, rather than just the…
To Have a More Successful Life, Understand the Motivations and Motives of Yourself and the People Around You Last month, I promised to pull more essays from my past out of the file cabinet. This one dealt with motives and understanding how they influence human behavior. This insight is one of the reasons I decided…
One of the weekly traditions in my life, the family get-together of four generations, rolled around again today and it was our turn to provide the food, meaning the kitchen was a flurry of activity for three or four hours as the dishes were prepared. The menu was set as follows: Main Dish 1: A…
One of the things that helped me build wealth early in my career is the realization that there is no “stock market”. Instead, there are individual businesses and individual investors who own those businesses. From time to time, a business owner may want to increase or decrease his ownership in a company so he approaches…
After publishing my newest About.com article, What is a Mutual Fund Family? as part of a new group of content focused on very, very basic financial concepts for beginners, I spent the morning over a cup of coffee in my home, curled up at a desk in a side room with reading lamps (it was dark…
In recent days, I have been immersing myself in the annual reports and other filings of a company called Brown-Forman. The company, which manufactures Jack Daniel’s whiskey, Chambord vodka, Korbel Champagnes, and other brands of spirits, is still controlled by the family that has owned it for more than a century, with two classes of stock trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
A Lesson On Life and Money from Big Daddy Pollitt In the film adaptation of the Tony winning Tennessee Williams play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Big Daddy Pollitt (Burl Ives), a very wealthy planation owner in Mississippi who built his fortune from nothing, learns he is dying from an inoperable cancer. There is a…
I am working on my What is a mutual fund? category at About.com and a thought struck me. I wanted to go back and look at the most recent investing lifetime (the 50 year period between 1960 and 2010). I imagined that an investor could have bought the S&P 500 stock market index (obviously you can’t…
The media is making a big deal out of the recent stock market drops, acting as if we were living through some sort of new paradigm where stock collapses are unheard of and Wall Street rips off small investors. The past 200 years have been a fantastic time to be a long-term value investor despite some…
There is an old Rolex ad featuring the explorer Sir Edmund Hillary. The tagline was powerful. “People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things.” You are nothing more, and nothing less, than the choices you’ve made in your life. Warren Buffett is Warren Buffett because he chose to start a business…