Question: do alternative investments belong in your portfolio? Read this op-ed with care because it’s exactly how Your Survival Guy feels about alternative investments. All’s fine and good until you need your money back and you realize they’re not exactly liquid or what you were sold. Hunter Lewis writes in The Wall Street Journal: Venture and buyout funds are hugely popular—and also imperiled by ethical and other problems. I have a long history with such funds. As an adviser to Yale in the 1970s, I recommended that it make its first venture-capital investment. I gave similar advice to … [Read more...]
What Facebook’s Libra Means to You
Facebook’s entry into cryptocurrencies with Libra is a shot across the bow for banks. Over time you will be the winner with lower transactions fees or friction, but will it gain traction? At the heart of Libra is trust. Do you trust Facebook? Do you trust Facebook to take care of your personal financial information? What’s different about Libra compared to Bitcoin for example is that you still need to have trust. Facebook will use blockchain technology to track your exchange of dollars, euros, or yen, for example, into Libra. But the ledger will be private. It will be controlled by … [Read more...]
One of the Hottest Niche Investments of the Past Decade
I still have my original baseball card collection, some of the cards from as far back as the 1948 Bowmans. Here, The Wall Street Journal gives readers a glimpse of one of the ultimate rarities in the history of baseball card collecting. In 1960, Topps Co. cleared space in its cramped Brooklyn warehouse by renting a barge, loading it with boxes of baseball cards that had sold poorly and dumping them in the Atlantic Ocean. Nearly 60 years later, that renegade housecleaning maneuver has inadvertently created one of the hottest niche investments of the past decade: the 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle … [Read more...]