May 2014

The First Task of the Day

In the Wall Street Journal this weekend – a commencement address given by Admiral William H. McRaven, ninth commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, to the graduating class of the University of Texas last week. In it, McRaven relays ten lessons from Navy SEAL training that are immediately applicable to all of our lives, no matter…

Warren Buffett: These were my biggest early mistakes

Happy Memorial Day Weekend! Today I thought we’d spend some time with one of investing’s greatest minds at a critical point in history.  The below is excerpted from Warren Buffett’s 1989 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. Buffett was commemorating twenty five years at the helm of Berkshire, a period during which he’d grown the company’s…

Absolute Returns LOL

The greatest trick Wall Street ever pulled was convincing Main Street that Volatility was the same thing as Risk. — Downtown Josh Brown (@ReformedBroker) May 25, 2014   If your so-called “Absolute Returns” hedge fund crushed it over the last 18 months, I have two pieces of news for you: A) it’s not really an…

Too Many Faders, Not Enough Fade

The S&P 500 limped through a new all-time closing high above 1900 this week, snapping a two-week sell-off streak and perplexing anyone who owns stocks and not indices – the participation is pathetic at best, very few NYSE stocks are printing new all-time highs along with the averages. But, as David Tepper says. it is…

Great Rotation, Interrupted

The Great Rotation market meme of early 2013 turned out to have nailed it, perfectly capturing what was happening in the investment business and, by extension, the major averages. Stocks jumped on the first day of trading last January, never went negative on the year for even a second, rallied a historic 30% and finished…

A view from inside the bubble

Jessica Pressler (New York Magazine) spends some time with the startuppy founders of “The Uber of Laundry.” It took me a little while to realize that her story was a story and not a parody… Sitting in an upscale pizza restaurant in Santa Monica, the kind of place where the cuisine has been disrupted so…