The Samurai Portfolio: Protecting Your Wealth From Attack
Investors sometimes ask whether they should reduce their stock exposure when uncertainty is rising. The concern might be an upcoming midterm election, escalating geopolitical tensions, worries about government debt, elevated valuations, or simply a known date when the money will be needed. And honestly, these are all valid concerns today. Rather than selling what you […]
What Drives Stock Returns?
Most prognosticators focus on one single idea to predict where the market is headed, they focus on earnings growth. This common idea is straightforward, if corporate earnings continue to rise, stock prices should follow. The reality is for more nuanced. While growth in earnings is extremely important over the long-term, over the short-term it’s investor […]
NVIDIA, the AI Money Machine
For decades, the largest financial institutions represented the center of economic power. Banks controlled capital flows, financed businesses, and served as the backbone of trade & business. Today however, technology companies are increasingly becoming the infrastructure upon which the modern world operates. NVIDIA’s graphics processors and AI computing systems are powering everything from artificial intelligence […]
The System is Rigged
It is. The system is rigged. IT IS RIGGED. I’ll say it again; THE SYSTEM IS RIGGED. Yep, I said it. I’m sure you’ve been told at some point the system is rigged. What you won’t believe is—it’s rigged in your favor (if you are an investor). Why do I say this? Because literally everyone […]
Oil Prices and the Stock Market…Reading the Tea Leaves
Looking at the chart, the takeaway is subtle, and widely misunderstood. Oil and stocks do not have a clean dependable relationship. Using financial jargon, they are NOT highly correlated over time. What this means, sometimes they move in the same direction and diverge other times, more importantly, occasionally do the exact opposite of what the […]
Making Sense of the Noise
The media often talks about volatility as if it were a design flaw in markets, an inconvenience to be engineered away. It is not. Volatility is the admission price to the long-term compounding machine that is the equity market. Savings accounts feel safe because their returns are contractually smoothed. The bank absorbs short-term fluctuations in […]
Understanding The Market Triangle
Market declines can be uncomfortable, when headlines turn negative, fear starts to rise, and the media reinforces and amplifies the negative sentiment. Paradoxically, some of the most powerful wealth-building opportunities emerge precisely during these periods. In late March and early April of 2025, markets experienced a sharp drawdown driven by tariff fears, with the S&P […]
We are Drowning in Information, while Starving for Wisdom
We live in an age where data is no longer scarce; in fact, it’s overwhelming. We carry supercomputers in our pockets, can find out any fact or figure to even our most outlandish questions in seconds. Access to data has been thoroughly democratized. Yet, despite this flood of data, we suffer from understanding. With all […]
Volatility is Loud, Fundamentals Are Quiet
Investors and the media love stocks until they don’t. The image above plots the one-month daily price-change volatility of Apple (AAPL), NVIDIA (NVDA), Amazon (AMZN), and Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) over the last 10-years. The monthly values gyrate in different directions and at different magnitudes, but they all share a common theme: Even the world’s strongest […]
Skating to Where the Economic “Puck” Is Going
Wayne Gretzky famously said, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” In many ways, that single line captures the core philosophy of successful long-term investing. As investors, our job is not simply to analyze today’s financial situation – which reflect the past – but to understand where […]