Category Archives: General Investing

Google was busy relishing its unrelenting grip on the search business and along comes ChatGPT, a supposed Google-killer that helped lop several hundred billion dollars off its market value. Whether ChatGPT does any lasting damage to the core of Google’s business is to be seen but the stock market thinks there will be some damage.Continue reading “How Risky Are Individual Stocks?”

We’ll start with the simplest of all possible investments and that is buying Treasury bonds. When we buy a bond, we become a lender. And with Treasury bonds, we become a lender to the U.S. government. So, say the yield (interest rate) on a Treasury bond that matures in 10 years is 5 percent. ForContinue reading “Demystifying Investment Returns”

The truth about the Warren Buffett class of wealth is that if somehow a Buffett were to be stripped of all his wealth, his life wouldn’t change. The Gates and the Zuckerbergs of the world fall into the same league. Some do indeed live larger than you and me, but you can tell that they are not into it. They don’t seem toContinue reading “An Obvious Secret To Wealth”

Joel Greenblatt, founder of Gotham Funds, says that the secret to investing is figuring out the value of something and then paying a lot less to buy it. Obvious but wish it were that easy. Price is not the problem. We see it quoted every day for the businesses that are publicly traded. Getting theContinue reading “Return of Investment”

Bernard Madoff was a successful money manager for more than twenty years until it was discovered that he was in fact running a giant, $65 billion Ponzi scheme. And the who’s who from Wall Street to Hollywood to Main Street were taken to the cleaners in one of the largest frauds ever perpetrated. So howContinue reading “Takeaways From Investment Scams”

Warren Buffett says that investing is simple but not easy. Let us reconcile these two data points from two different news sources at the onset of COVID. The US economy lost 20.5 million jobs in April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Friday — by far the most sudden and largest decline since the government began tracking theContinue reading “Investing Is Hard”

Americans afraid of flying overwhelmingly took to the nation’s highways in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. But flying as we know is much, much safer than driving can ever be. Our odds of getting killed in a plane crash – one in a million. Our chances of dying in a carContinue reading “Recency Bias”

Joseph Granville was in the business of prognostication. He was a stock market maven. He knew precisely what to buy and when to buy. He moved markets. And he let it all know in a newsletter he published called the Granville Market Letter. In that, he gave specific instructions on whether it was time to buyContinue reading “Let Prognosticators Pontificate”

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple. We all know that. What many don’t know is that there was a third co-founder. His name was Ronald Wayne. The reason we don’t hear much about him is because he quit Apple just two weeks after the company was formed. He then sold his 10 percent stake in the company forContinue reading “Quit Playing The Game You’ve Already Won”

Edwin Lefèvre in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, a 1923 pseudo-fictional novel, chronicles the life of Jesse Livermore, a real person who was a stock trader par excellence of the time. He made and lost fortunes many times over but ultimately and tragically ended up taking his own life. Jesse Livermore went from being one of theContinue reading “A Tale of Two Speculators”