White Papers
Forward-Looking Due Diligence
March 2023
For some reason investors continue to use past performance to predict future results. This is the single biggest mistake investors make and has led to big investment blowups throughout history. Think about it: if you put money in any type of investment, does it matter what it did in the past, or is it only important what it does in the future? Forward-looking due diligence looks at past performance, but not in a way that expects it to be replicated in the future. Instead, it tries to determine what performance is likely to be in the future, and more importantly, what could go wrong.
What Successful Investing Has in Common with Nutrition
December 2022
One of the principles that has driven growth and innovation in society is delegation, or the idea that you don’t have to know how to do everything. What you don’t know, somebody else can most likely do for you. I believe there are areas, however, in which you should be educated, whether you delegate or not. Nutrition and finance are two such areas, and mistakes in either could be costly.
Risk Management for Retail Traders
December 2022
The retail revolution that came out of Covid was a logical pushback against the traditional Wall Street dogma that generates large fees for Wall Street but tends to shortchange the investor. I saw a similar revolution in the late 90s around internet stocks. Unfortunately, many retail investors ended up getting crushed as many of their favorite stocks suffered massive losses.
Asset Allocation for a World Where Interest Rates Don’t Always Go Down and Stocks Don’t Always Go Up
December 2022
Those who follow our work know that I think the idea of Asset Allocation (AA) is problematic. When I started in financial services in the 1990s, one would work with a broker (there were no financial advisors back then) to make money. There was no talk of the S&P 500 and it didn’t matter what the Dow was doing.
Insights
Fading The Consensus by Taking the Opposite Side of Jim Cramer’s Picks
In our opinion, long time investors and traders know that the consensus is usually wrong, especially at major inflection points in the market. We often watch things like put/call ratios, implied volatility in options, or institutional and retail sentiment studies. ...
Traditional Investment Approaches are Ok (If You Are Ok with Just Doing Ok)
I have been posting and tweeting a lot about the dangers of traditional set-and-forget investment strategies, such as 60/40, target date, asset allocation, etc. Last year was the first time in a while that stocks and bonds both went down. If this continues, it puts...
It’s Not “Either/Or”, It’s Both
Which is better: fundamental or technical analysis? This is a years-old debate, one that will likely continue. However, to me, like just about everything else on Wall Street, the answer doesn’t rest on whether one is better than the other, but rather on when it can be...
The Rise and Fall of the Retail Trading Revolution: Can a New, Smarter Approach Emerge?
I recently saw this headline on Bloomberg.com: The Cult of the Retail Trader Has Fizzled "The GameStop and AMC manias are long gone, with individual investor returns falling 40% this year and digital currency prices tumbling." The article is behind a pay wall, but I...