Category Archives: General Investing

You think you’ll spend like this… But instead, you spend like this… Retirement experts who’ve studied this say that we spend in three phases… The go-go years are your first set of years in retirement. You play, you travel, you spend. Then you start to slow down. Your spending naturally declines. And then you reallyContinue reading “The Retirement Spending Smile”

Cockroaches are the ultimate survivors1. They can live without air for an hour, without food and water for months. They can survive the Arctic cold. Ice ages and continent shifts mean nothing to them. It is no surprise then that the cockroach as a species has been around for 300 million years and it isContinue reading “Plan Like A Cockroach”

Buying businesses (stocks) is not about winning popularity contests. In fact, the more popular a stock or a category of stocks gets, the less likely its price matches its value. Pay too rich a price for a popular stock du jour and you could be sitting on that stock forever, never to be made whole.Continue reading “Sidestepping Bubble Stocks”

Cookie-cutting the investing process seldom works. Take for example someone who is a federal government employee, and we know what that entails: a rock-solid job security with access to an equally rock-solid pension plan. So, assuming she continues to work there till she retires, should she ever own bonds? And we know the deal withContinue reading “Prepackaged Portfolios Are Seldom Optimal”

San Luis Obispo has one of the cutest downtowns in California. A must try there if you are ever around is a Turkish pastry shop called Lokum. So, so good. On a stroll to one of the many beaches there, I happened to come across a long-retired couple, likely in their seventies, voluntarily cleaning upContinue reading “Retire To Something”

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 ran a successful wealth management business for multiple decades. He was the chairperson of the Nasdaq stock exchange. People looked up to him until it was discovered that he was in fact running a giant Ponzi scheme. And the who’s who from Wall Street to Hollywood to Main Street were taken to theContinue reading “Takeaways From Investment Scams”