Dear friends, I know that for lots of you, this is the season of Big Questions: Is the Fed’s insistence on destroying the incentive to save (my credit union savings account is paying 0.05%) creating a disastrous incentive to move “safe” resources into risky asset classes? Has the recent passion for high quality, dividend-paying stocks [...]
Dear friends, As most of you know, my day job is as a professor at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. We have a really lovely campus (one prospective student once joked that we’re the only college he’d visited that actually looked like its postcards) and, as the weather has warmed, I’ve returned to taking [...]
Dear friends, Welcome to the end of a long, odd month. The market bounced. The pope took a long victory lap around St. Peter’s Square in his Popemobile before giving up the red shoes for life. King Richard III was discovered after 500 years buried under a parking lot with evidence of an ignominious wound [...]
Yep, January’s been good. Scary-good. There are several dozen funds that clocked double-digit gains, including several scary-bad ones (Birmiwal Oasis? Legg Mason Capital Management Opportunity C?) but no great funds. So if your portfolio is up six or seven or eight percent so far in 2013, smile and then listen to Han Solo’s call: “Great, [...]
Dear friends, We’ve been listening to REM’s “It’s the End of the World (as we know it)” and thinking about copyrighting some useful terms for the year ahead. You know that Bondpocalypse and Bondmageddon are both getting programmed into the pundits’ vocabulary. Chip suggests Bondtastrophe and Bondaster. Bad asset classes (say, TIPs and long bonds) [...]
Dear friends, And now, we wait. After the frenzy of recent months, that seems odd and unnatural. Will and his minions wait for the holidays, anxious for the last few weeks of school to pass but secure in the knowledge that their folks are dutifully keeping the retail economy afloat. My colleagues at Augustana are [...]
Dear friends, I had imagined this as the “post-storm, pre-cliff” edition of the Observer but it appears that “post-storm” would be a very premature characterization. For four million of our friends who are still without power, especially those along the coast or in outlying areas, the simple pleasures of electric lighting and running water remain [...]
Dear friends, The trees have barely begun to change color here in Iowa. The days are warm, football is in the air (had I mentioned that my son Will had a running touchdown on offense and a nifty interception on defense this week?) and dentists everywhere are gearing up for Halloween. It’s an odd time, [...]
Dear friends, Welcome to what are, historically, the two most turbulent months in the market. Eight of the Dow’s 20 biggest one-day gains ever have occurred in September or October but so have 12 of the 20 biggest one-day losses. And that might be a good thing. Some exceedingly talented investors, like Eric “I Like [...]
June 1, 2013
Dear friends, I am not, in a monetary sense, rich. Teaching at a small college pays rather less, and raising a multi-talented 12-year-old costs rather more, than you’d imagine. I tend to invest cautiously in low-minimum, risk-conscious funds. I have good friends, drink good beer, laugh a lot and help coach Little League (an activity [...]