Weekly Commentary

Climbing the “Wall of Worry” – What Is That? World events once again dominated the headlines last week:   Japanese nuclear issues Unrest in the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA), specifically Libya and Syria The European Debt Crisis, specifically Portugal, Ireland and Greece   Certainly, the equity markets overcame some serious headlines this week […]

The World Is Falling Apart Again Last week’s blog made a fairly easy prediction for rough market conditions and extreme volatility. As usual, the human predictive ability is limited, and that applies to me. Who could foretell a nuclear disaster on top of a brutal dictator dominating our headlines? The markets were very extreme, especially […]

Advancing Philanthropy- Chronicles of Philanthropy Advancing Philanthropy – One for All and All for Nothing

Does it Really Matter? How do you write about Japan and its economy when the death toll from the earthquake and tsunami is expected to exceed 10,000? After all, nothing really matters like life, liberty and family. My thoughts and prayers are with the people of Japan. Given my profession though, I cannot simply dodge […]

What Gets Us into Trouble as Investors Is What Keeps Us Alive As Humans Inductive reasoning is one of the many thought processes we use today to make decisions and has helped us survive throughout our history. It’s our ability to make judgments (or should I say “educated guesses”) based upon past experiences. For example: […]

  Sesame Street takes on the Federal Budget   It has finally gotten to me. I have seen and heard so much about budget cutting and deficits and I suspect you have too. What’s the big deal about all of this and what is the possible impact on our markets and investments?   The proposals […]

Departure Speed While scrolling through the hundreds of tweets I receive on a daily basis; I found a nice chart that truly keeps things in perspective for me and I hope you as well. The stock market is up 100% and that’s amazing (Reference 1). The Fed has done it’s self described job of inflating […]

“Either we change the way we live or change the way they live”- Don Rumsfeld   With all that is going on in the Middle East I can’t help but reflect on an asset class that has been out of favor the last few years: energy. Looking at the chart below, out of all US […]

Some things in life really count and should be counted, some things in life really count and can’t be counted There are two sets of data that I want to bring to your attention in this very brief blog (as it is Super Bowl Sunday). I have a Super Bowl diet allocation of 3,500 calories […]

Two Sides of the Same Coin This week the news was dominated by the turmoil enveloping Egypt, the geopolitical center of the Middle East. What is occurring shares many of the same characteristics of the popular revolt in Iran during the 70’s. In that instance, extremists hijacked the moderate populous and moved the country to […]