Marketwatch reports that low-income families spend about 40% of their income on luxuries. That compares to the 65% that high-income families spend on luxury goods. Why are low-income families spending so much of their money on luxury goods? Marketwatch reports that nearly half of Americans attribute their profligate spending to emotion. Emotion and money don’t mix, particularly when it comes to investing. Some of the biggest investment blunders we’ve watched investors make are when fear or greed start to drive the decision making process. Successful investing requires a cold and … [Read more...]
Archives for June 2017
Lost 29 Years: This Japanese Comeback will Surprise You
What is old is new again in Japan. Next year Sony will begin doing something it hasn't done for 29 years. With incredible demand for vinyl records from consumers looking to recapture the excellent analog sounds of their youth, Sony will begin making its own vinyl records once again in Japan. As I wrote earlier this year, Becky and I love our vinyl record collection. And we're not the only ones. "2015 sales of $416 million were the highest since 1988. Stay tuned for 2016’s numbers." NPR's Bill Chappell writes that fans want the rich sound of vinyl, and they also love the liner notes and album … [Read more...]
The Battle Raging for Your Grocery Money
The announcement of Amazon's purchase of Whole Foods was a big deal, but it also has raised the profile of a war that's been raging in the grocery business for years now. Americans seem to have become more price conscious and that has bolstered low-price stores like Aldi. They've also become more focused on online grocery shopping, which has helped many smaller companies gain a share of the market. But big grocers are having a tough time holding on to customers in the face of the new competition from low cost and online companies. Consumers are buying more of their groceries outside of … [Read more...]
Blue Apron IPO Flounders
"After 2 months of Blue Apron @ $10/serving, customers can always return to the Trader Joe's freezer case, and a nice social experience, @ $2.79 per serving,” writes a commenter at WSJ re: food delivery IPO from Blue Apron which looks to be having trouble attracting investors. The company had hoped for shares to sell for between $15 and $17. Instead they are priced for $10. The Wall Street Journal reports that investors may have been worried about profitability, a welcome change from recent history. The outcome is far from what Blue Apron anticipated when the company launched its … [Read more...]
Bank Dividends Soar
After U.S. banks passed the Fed’s latest stress tests with flying colors, bank dividends are soaring. Some of our highly favored banks just increased their dividends as much as 35% in addition to announcing increased buybacks. The FT reports on bank dividends. Now, rather than accumulating capital to build buffers against losses, the likes of Morgan Stanley and Bank of America can start handing it back. Across the 34 banks which took this year’s exam, payouts to shareholders will come close to 100 per cent of projected profits over the next year, according to senior Fed officials, up from … [Read more...]
Billionaire Shipping Magnate Buys Tankers to Prepare for Oil Rebound
John Fredriksen, a billionaire shipping magnate, is looking to buy oil tanker companies. He wants to prepare for a rebound in oil prices and expand his business empire. Fredriksen wants to spend more than $2 billion on acquisitions to overtake his competition as the largest shipping company in the world. Costas Paris writes: “We used to be the biggest VLCC owner, but now we are No. 4,” as his tanker company,Frontline Ltd. , was overtaken by rivals, said Mr. Fredriksen in a rare interview earlier this month. “I’m looking to invest more than two billion [dollars] in acquisitions,” he said, … [Read more...]
Does Active Management Still Matter?
T. Rowe Price CEO William Stromberg says “Over a market cycle, we’ll put up our results against passive any day of the week.” But investors, focused as usual on the short-term, continue to pour more money into index funds, eschewing actively managed funds. T. Rowe Price is trying to reverse a trend that has seen money pour out of its actively managed funds. Charles Stein writes at Bloomberg: Challenging indexers will be a mighty effort. Investors have pulled $444 billion from funds run by stock pickers in the last 17 months while adding about $575 billion to mutual and exchange-traded funds … [Read more...]
Big Oil Doubling Down on This Investment
With the shale revolution generating massive new oil and gas supplies, big oil companies are looking for ways to maximize returns on the glut. For the biggest oil majors, like ExxonMobil and Shell, investment in petrochemicals, especially plastics, seems like the best route to increased profit. Spending on new petrochemical projects is taking off in the U.S. Christopher Matthews writes: Companies are eagerly launching new U.S. petrochemical projects—310 in all according to the Chemistry Council—because at a time of uncertainty over when demand for transportation fuels may peak, due to … [Read more...]
This AI Can Predict Your Income From Space
A computer scientist from Carnegie Mellon University, named Aman Tiwari, has created an artificial intelligence which can predict the income of a person by viewing their neighborhood and their home. The AI, known as Penny, has been fed information such as incomes for a given neighborhood alongside pictures of that neighborhood provided by DigitalGlobe, and taught to decipher what inputs are meaningful to predicting the residents' incomes. Robbie Gonzalez writes at WIRED: Penny provides a glimpse at how AI and machine learning make sense of a city. "It’s not for deciding whether to put a … [Read more...]
This is why Calm Markets Should Worry You
Hyman Minsky was an economist whose theories were made famous during the 2008 sub-prime crisis. Minsky’s work focused on the fragility of financial markets. It was, and still is, mostly ignored by the mainstream economic establishment. The Cliff’s Notes version of Minsky’s work is that stability breeds instability. Calm markets encourage excessive risk taking which can lead to crisis. After decades of stability in the housing market resulted in one of the most devastating recessions on record, one might have hoped Yellen & Co., the folk with the most control over financial markets, … [Read more...]
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