Would you trust a money manager who couldn’t recall the names of the stocks in his portfolio? Probably not.  You expect the person overseeing your investments to have intimate knowledge of every holding.  It’s your money on the line, after all.  To not know would be reckless and irresponsible. Yet for Thomas Howard, finance professor,...Read More

Utilities don’t get a lot of love from investors.  They are the stodgiest of market sectors and tend to be purchased by the proverbial “widows and orphans” looking for a safe and reliable quarterly dividend check.  And their sensitivity to interest rates makes them closer in behavior to bonds than more cyclical market sectors such...Read More

How does an investment manager reconcile all of the various prognostications he hears on a daily basis? Simple—ignore them. —Meb Faber, Global Value If you’ve never heard of Cambria Investment Management’s Meb Faber, then you have some serious catching up to do.  I consider Faber one of the most innovative strategists in the business today,...Read More

“Questioning yourself is hard.” These are the opening words of Ken Fisher’s latest book, The Little Book of Market Myths: How to Profit by Avoiding the Investing Mistakes Everyone Else Makes, and I am inclined to agree.  Being a good investor requires two contradictory sets of skills.  You must be confident and independent minded; but...Read More

If you think today’s heated debates about Social Security entitlements presage conflict between the generations, Juan Carlos Cantú’s Age Warfare presents a future demographic nightmare in which the old use their collective power at the ballot box to keep younger generations in a state of low-wage, low-opportunity economic slavery. Cantú’s novel is fiction, of course....Read More