Art Cashin leads the annual NYE tradition on December 31st These were the most read posts on the site this week, in case you missed them:
Joshua M Brown
Yeah I said it.
There are two options to Get Out Of Jail in Monopoly – pay or roll the dice for doubles. This is how god sorts out bankers from traders. — Downtown Josh Brown (@ReformedBroker) December 24, 2014
QOTD: Lefsetz on the Apple Watch
So there’s one vote for the watch working. Fred Wilson doesn’t agree.
Fun With Wall Street’s S&P 500 Targets
The best thing about Wall Street’s annual S&P 500 targets is that they’re never right. The consensus is so far off the mark in most years that it’s almost hilarious that research departments still put these things out. At this stage in the game, professional investors don’t take them seriously at all. They just accept them…
Hope Springs Eternal
I really hope that 2015 will be The Year Of Active Management. Because 2014 was supposed to be only it didn’t work out that way. Instead, it was the worst year for stock picking mutual fund managers in three decades, with only 10 percent exceeding their benchmarks (that’s a 90% rate of failure, in case…
Hot Links: Try Everything
What I’m reading this morning
QOTD: In praise of a little Organizational Dysfunction
The inimitable David Snowball looks ahead to 2015 and sees the potential for a new trend in mutual fund management – the need for a bit of friction within an organization to stand out… From the Mutual Fund Observer, January 1st 2015 edition: a lot of hedge funds folded in 2014, mainly for reasons of…
Cuba Muppet Follow-Up
On December 17th, when President Obama and Raoul Castro made their historic announcement about “normalizing relations” between Cuba and the US, I published a post about the most popular vehicle to play the event, a closed-end fund with the ticker symbol CUBA. The Herzfeld Caribbean Basin closed end fund, ticker symbol CUBA, was designed decades…
Good Times Teach Only Bad Lessons
I don’t mean to start 2015 off on a sour note, but there’s something I should say – particularly for the benefit of my younger readers and for those who are newer to investing. As the Howard Marks quote above illustrates, enduring pain in the markets provides the very best lessons we can learn as…
Ithaka
As you set out for Ithaka hope the voyage is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery. Laistrygonians and Cyclops, angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them: you’ll never find things like that on your way as long as you keep your thoughts raised high, as long as a rare excitement stirs your spirit…
