More and more people are “protesting” against the disproportionate growth of the top 5 stocks in the S&P 500. Amid a sea of nonsense, there’s a valid concern buried within. It’s not so difficult to understand how publicly traded financial assets work, and all we have to do is describe them in the way that […]

If you start with the hypothesis that the price of stocks should represent the overall economy, maybe it’s not so strange that you would try to blame someone when you are proven wrong. There’s no question that economic crises and bear markets with stocks can happen together, and it’s actually pretty unusual that we see […]

It should not come as a surprise to anyone that investors allow their political biases to influence their investing views and decisions. We need to understand what biases we have. People struggle enough with trying to figure out what they should be doing with their stock portfolios to want to make this task even more […]

Stock indexes are neither created equally nor are necessarily designed to be representative of stocks in general. People want them to be, but they need to wonder why. Whenever we refer to how stocks in general or the stock market is doing, we refer to the performance of stock indexes, baskets of stocks assembled by […]

Some very old ideas about investing have been dying a slow death for many years, losing ground in a survival of the fittest. Their weakness is being even more exposed now. Charles Darwin’s portrayal of the evolution of biological species being a matter of the survival of the fittest is an idea that applies well […]

While many investors see options positions as a risky way to hit a big score, options are also used to protect against risk. They all need to come with warnings on the label. It is always curious to see people recommending options trading of any sort to individual investors, given how complex options trading is […]

With the growth of the stock market in general thought to be dimming, and bond yields being so low, preferred stock is starting to look more attractive to many investors. One of the first things you learn when you study stocks is that there are two main types, common stock and preferred stock. Preferred stock […]

We may not want to always trade like institutional investors do, but sometimes it pays to think the way they do, and even follow them as they look to buy the dips we’ve seen lately. Whenever we see markets sell off, like we did in February and March, the first thing we need to do […]

The United States has been embroiled in racial inequality for 400 years now. We’ve made at least some progress to be sure, but it’s very clear that more needs to be done. The human race has made incredible progress on the technological side of things, and when we look at these achievements, we would think […]

The street was somehow expecting a further loss of 7.5 million jobs in May, to go along with the 23 million we lost in March and April. We instead added 2.5 million this time. May’s jobs report should not really have been the surprise that it turned out to be. We’re not sure where we […]