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Investment Research Since 1978

Tucker Explains: Poverty Doesn’t Cause Instability. Envy Does.

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You don’t need to be rich to live the good life. The good life is more a way of life. Not to sound too trippy but “it’s a feeling, man.” Sort of like the peace and love shared by Deadheads swaying to Jerry, or classic rock fans to Hendrix at Woodstock. You can’t always explain why you feel a certain way. You just do. That’s how it was for me growing up. I just felt good about my family. I liked my friends and life was good. But we weren’t rich. And it didn’t matter. We didn’t talk about our place in society. We were middle class and our place was a small single level cape in … [Read more...]

Can Reuse Save the Mega Brands, and the World?

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Some of the world's biggest branded consumer products and food companies, including Procter & Gamble, Nestle, PepsiCo and Unilever are planning to begin trial sales of their products using reusable packaging. The recycling company, TerraCycle, will handle deliveries and pickups of the products and their packaging. Saabira Chaudhuri reports for The Wall Street Journal: Refillables once dominated industries such as beer and soft drinks but lost out to convenient, affordable single-use containers. In 1947, refillables made up 100% of soft-drink containers by volume and 86% of beer … [Read more...]

R.I.P. Jack Bogle.

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Vanguard’s founder Jack Bogle contributed so much to each of us in the investment industry that it is impossible for me to know where to begin. In my case, it is perhaps a little easier to understand Jack’s importance in the investment industry because I was there when Jack founded Vanguard. In the Summer of 1971, Jack was still with his former employer, Wellington Management. Wellington was then, and remains today, based in Boston. And Jack’s firm was my favorite institutional research and trading client. Today, nearly 50 years later, I deal with a Jack Bogle firm nearly every … [Read more...]

Remembering Jack Bogle

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You know the Vanguard 500 Index thanks to him. And someday, if a Mount Rushmore for investor legends is carved into a mountain side, Jack Bogle will be there front and center. Mr. Bogle passed away yesterday at the age of 89. He will be remembered for the low cost index fund—an idea he made into reality. Though he cautioned in recent months about his grave concerns regarding the explosive growth of indexing—perhaps a product also in its twilight—it turned out that offering a sound investment product at a low cost was, and is, a great idea for investors. Originally posted on Your … [Read more...]

Is Mikaela Shiffrin the World’s Best Athlete?

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As Barry Svrluga writes in The Washington Post, there comes a time in each great athlete's career where they become so dominant they must be compared across time rather than to their same-sport contemporaries. I’ve written about Mikaela Shiffrin before. Then, as now, I agree with Bode Miller--I’m not sure we’ve ever seen anyone better in the sport of skiing, male or female. At a certain point, the manner in which the best in any field evaluate themselves can’t be against other practitioners of that same pursuit. LeBron isn’t measured against his contemporaries; he’s measured against … [Read more...]

Fidelity is Boston and Boston is Fidelity

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When you’re an intern at a start-up, you have certain responsibilities. For me, it was to go pick-up lunch when the founders ordered out. But what was cool about being the intern was that I had a seat at the table. I was privy to all their war stories. It was fun (for them) to talk about how hard it was when they were my age—broke, jobless and about to graduate from college. As they looked back it was the road not the destination. Easy for them to say. One of the stories I liked best was when the CEO would talk about how he decided to work in Boston. He said, “I knew it was going to be hard … [Read more...]

Babson College Announces New President

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"Babson College, which marks its centennial next year, has tapped a familiar face to replace Kerry Healey, its outgoing president and the first woman to lead the Wellesley business school," reports the Boston Globe. "Stephen Spinelli Jr., a cofounder of Jiffy Lube International, Inc. who worked at Babson from 1993 to 2007, will become the college’s 14th president in July, the school said Friday." Laura Crimaldi writes: Spinelli, 63, is returning to the school after spending 11 years in Pennsylvania, where he served as president of Philadelphia University and negotiated the school’s merger … [Read more...]

McDonald’s Fights Overuse of Antibiotics in Beef

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Deena Shanker writes for Bloomberg that McDonald's is fighting the overuse of antibiotics by implementing new guidelines for its beef suppliers. McDonald's is such a large buyer of beef, its new policies could affect the entire beef industry. Shanker writes: As consumers have grown increasingly concerned with how their food is made, they have demanded a number of changes, including antibiotic-free meat and poultry. Scientists say the overuse of antibiotics in agriculture is behind the growing global problem of antimicrobial resistance. The chain has been on a mission to clean up its … [Read more...]