Investing in stock indexes doesn’t require any skill in stock picking at all. How can no skill beat the presumed skill of fund managers? They obviously aren’t using much skill. Actively managed mutual funds have quite a few limitations versus what we can do with our own accounts as individual investors. If we are considering […]

If the stock market was really concerned about things like valuation, the coronavirus offered the bears a perfect opportunity to flee. The bulls are still carrying the day. In the midst of what was a dramatic selloff in the markets that coincided with concerns that China’s response to the coronavirus threat that they are battling […]

The U.S. Congressional Budget Office has just issued a warning that the debt situation has deteriorated considerably since last August. How much do we have to worry about this? A trillion dollars is not an amount that people can easily get their heads around. This is why people break this down on a per-capita basis, […]

One of the legacies of economist Milton Friedman was the concept of stakeholder capitalism. People are now looking to modify this, but not in an intelligent way. While economics and politics share a lot of common ground, the biggest difference between them is that economics takes rationality into account, where politics is based primarily upon […]

Normally, it is preferable to let the market determine the price of something. With something that is believed to be essential, we need to really make sure the market is free. Free markets need to actually be free markets for them to do their thing and seek out efficiency. The key word here is free, […]

Unlike some big growth companies, Apple stock actually pays dividends, although the yield on this is now down to about 1%. Apple has wisely focused more on stock buybacks. There remains a big debate out there about whether companies should favor dividends or share buybacks. The fact that so many people favor dividends in the […]

When two hotheads and gunslingers Donald Trump and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei get into a gunfight, anything can happen. It turns out that both are wiser than they get credit for. The stakes were high in the current confrontation between the United States and Iran. World leaders are generally careful in their remarks, even when they […]

With the potential for conflict between Iran and the United States at hand, while we should not overestimate the risk to stocks, some are advising that we hedge our bets. Stock markets don’t like conflict, and especially do not like ones that risk putting up the price of oil considerably. While President Trump certainly raised […]

Sector SPDRs group the market in 10 categories, where we can select the ones we want and the ones we don’t. Going with the better half of these makes a lot of sense. We can categorize stocks into two categories, the ones that outperform and the ones that underperform. If we buy a stock market […]

Goldman Sachs is in agreement with the consensus that 2020 will be mildly bullish. Their use of the Sharpe index to pick individual stocks is what is most interesting. David Kostin, chief U.S. equity strategist for Goldman Sachs, is forecasting more of the same for stocks next year, although the consensus is that growth in […]