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Manager & Investment Selection
MONEYBALL INVESTING: THE REAL REASON SWINGING FOR THE FENCES IS BAD FOR YOUR PORTFOLIO
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One of the more iconic scenes in the movie, Moneyball, involves the baseball scouts discussing various players’ abilities. They note a player’s “classy” swing and then move on to his girlfriend’s looks for an assessment of his in-game proficiency. It’s both darkly humorous and a sly indictment of the flawed mechanics by which scouts judge players.
Investing Ideas
THE ARITHMETIC OF ASYMMETRY
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Anyone who has played a casual game of darts, say, at a bar or in the basement, knows an overarching rule of the game: it gets harder as it progresses. While rule systems vary, most games start with a wide-open board full of possibilities. But then, by the end, you’re aiming for the Double 18 and only the Double 18 to win. In short, it’s a game of precision that seems easy at first but becomes very, very hard by the end.
Fixed Income Insights
“No Jules, It’s High-Yield Bonds”
If you think back on Wall Street in the ‘80s, a few things come to mind: the ‘87 Crash (the S&P 500 was up that year), a secular bull market, interest rates in the teens, the movie Wall Street, corporate raiders and junk bonds.
Fixed Income Insights
The US 10-Year Note Yield – the good, the bad, and the (possibly) ugly
The US 10-Year Note is the most important fixed income instrument in the world. Its yield determines the borrowing costs for countries, companies, and consumers while the Note itself acts as a haven asset during periods of market and economic stress.
Behavioral Finance
Focused expertise
There have been many restrictions placed on the normal rhythms of life in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The interactions we typically take for granted such as going to restaurants, spending time with friends, working out at the gym, and traveling on vacation have all been curtailed in an effort to tame the pandemic.
Client Relationships
Positioning yourself as a behavioral coach
While there is plenty of economic upside to the specialization required of modern life, one downside is that hyper-specialization can lead to siloed thinking. For a psychologist like me, the hammer that I have (an understanding of the power of behavior) can lead me to see behavioral “nails” everywhere, even in places where they may not truly exist.
Fixed Income Insights
Weekly Wire: It’s always darkest before the dawn
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It is one thing to understand we are living through an unprecedented, pandemic driven economic downturn, and all together another to learn the US unemployment rate is 14.7% and that 20.5 million of our fellow Americans lost their jobs in April.
Behavioral Finance
Win the day
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As a child, my father (himself a financial advisor) had a single obsession—paying off our house.
Behavioral Finance
Should I be worried? An investor litmus test
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As a child, I remember seeing my mother’s wooden plaque of The Serenity Prayer that she kept above our kitchen sink. For those not familiar with this popular prayer, it reads...
Leveraging Technology & Data
Secrets
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Never has so much personal information been readily available to the general public. It’s surprising, then, that so many financial institutions continue to treat public knowledge as a “secret.”