I've always felt that buying a home when I was young made sense. I know putting money in the stock market instead of buying a house can be more profitable, but I didn't have any money at the time so that really wasn't an option for me. When I was starting out and working at Fidelity Investments, I worked out a deal to buy a three-family house with very little of my own money. I remember how hard it was asking my dad for a loan (it was less than $5,000) and working out the payment schedule. I rented out the top two units and lived in the bottom one, renting two of the three bedrooms in … [Read more...]
Archives for September 2014
Monday Melee: Small-cap Edition
Small Stocks Look Toppy What We're Reading Everyone's a stock market genius in a Fed-induced rally (Marketwatch) When not to load up on stocks (Fortune) Wanna be rich--get back to work! (The Guardian) Correlation and causation (Spurious Correlations) Know Which Fish Are Low in Mercury With This Chart (Lifehacker) … [Read more...]
The Party’s Over
A few years ago the Bank of England (BOE) used the chart below to explain the impact of money printing on the economy and financial markets. According to the BOE’s graph, there are two phases to quantitative easing, an impact phase and an adjustment phase. During the impact phase, there is a party on Wall Street. Asset prices soar far above what the underlying fundamentals would seem to support. The bonuses pile up and the liquor flows freely. Then, during the adjustment phase, economic activity and inflation pick up, but asset prices take it in the neck (red line). With the Federal … [Read more...]
The China Factor
With much of the investment world focused on geopolitical events in Europe and the Middle East and how much or how little money the Fed and the European Central Bank are going to print, China seems to have fallen off of the radar. It shouldn’t. China is a major player in the global economy. It is the world’s second largest economy and the world’s fastest growing large economy. China sucks up a majority of the world’s resources. It is the largest consumer of aluminum, copper, cotton, and coal just to name a few. If the Chinese economy craters, the world will feel the pain and if it … [Read more...]
The Economy’s Weak Link
One of the reasons this business cycle recovery has been one of the weakest on record is that it hasn’t been firing on all cylinders. The weak link among the cyclical sectors of the economy has been residential fixed investment. While there has been some recovery from the dark days of the financial crisis, adjusted for inflation, residential investment is no higher than it was 20 years ago. Non-residential fixed investment, which is made up of business investment in factories, equipment and intellectual property has already hit a new high. With the housing market looking more like it is … [Read more...]
Bluefish!
Owen caught this beauty just outside of Newport harbor. … [Read more...]
The Monday Melee: Incomplete Recovery, Tesla, and Apple
Quoted: Apple CEO Tim Cook Tim Cook on Charlie Rose when asked what drives Apple: "I was at Compaq at a time where the objective was to become a $40 billion company. Well, employees don't get excited about that. This isn't something you wake up and you go, 'I'm going to take the hill today to do 40' -- I mean, you know? It's just not that. But changing the world? These are the things that people work for. And this pushes people. And so, this is who we are as people." America's Travel Recovery Still Incomplete: What We're Reading: Minimum Wage-Hiking States Are Seeing Slower Job … [Read more...]
Housing Permits Stagnate, is Regulation to Blame?
A disturbing look is appearing on the long-term chart of residential housing permits granted in the United States. The monthly measure has stabilized near 1 million. That’s about twice as many as the depths of the housing crisis, but not even close to its long term average of 1.4 million permits per month. Worse yet, you can see from the chart that it’s rare for a stabilization like this to have an upward exit. Most stabilizations signal an end of the cycle. In this case it would be the end of a housing cycle that hadn’t even really begun. Could the trouble be in restrictive government … [Read more...]
Compound Interest: The 8th Wonder of the World
Albert Einstein referred to compound interest as the 8th wonder of the world. Just look at the power of Investor #1's contributions early in life compared to Invest #2's effort to make up for lost time. Compounding is an undeniable winner. … [Read more...]
Top 10 Funds in 2014
What is working in the stock market this year? I ran a Morningstar screen of the top performing U.S. focused Large-cap blend (combination of growth and value) funds to find out which ones are beating the market YTD. Out of the 467 large-cap blend funds in the Morningstar database, about 94 have bested the S&P 500’s 9.74% YTD return. The top performing fund according to Morningstar is Upright Growth, up 20.1% YTD. How have Upright Growth and the other funds at the top of the heap beaten the market YTD? Among the Top 10 performing funds on the Morningstar list, the five largest … [Read more...]