Category: Musings

With the concern about inflation, TIPS (Treasury Inflation Protected Securities) seem to get a lot of attention. These are a bond where your return adjusts over time based upon the CPI rate. At the moment they have a negative real return, i.e. if you account for inflation then these bonds have a negative rate of...

There is an email circulating about Australia and guns.  Like many emails, it may err from the truth to make a point. I am not a statistician, criminologist or a gun owner.  I just want the facts about gun ownership in Australia to be portrayed somewhat accurately. I’m not making conclusions or taking a stand...

One of the most common investor concerns I hear is that they don’t want to invest until the economy improves. If the market and the economy moved together they should have a correlation of close to 1, say 0.8. Correlation is measured on a scale of -1 to 1, with -1 being perfectly negatively correlated...

Perhaps the most dangerous words in investing are “It’s Different This Time”.  This is not to be confused with the excellent book by Reinhart and Rogoff. Many wonder, what happened to the recovery that we should be experiencing at the moment. Are we not 4 years into an economic cycle that has had massive amounts...

I have been getting a lot of questions the last few days about changes to the tax code as a result of the recent legislation that was passed.  I have put together a brief email that has some of the salient points and links for further information. I have included some commentary from David Rosenberg,...

With the election being tomorrow – the noise around the markets will reach a cacophony – “Who is the better candidate for the market?”, is a frequently asked question.  Who cares – each party is responsible for the debt and stagnant growth that we now face. Republican/Democrat doesn’t  matter, both useless. With a government that...

I went to an interesting presentation last night – Locationpalooza – sponsored by Commnexus. It was looking at a few different companies and the way they are using different location and monitoring technologies.  Apart from the ubiquitous GPS services and car mapping technologies – an interesting company Tomnod is using satellite imagery in a few...

As advisors we are accountable for the results that we deliver to our clients.  Those results can be measured in different ways: did we generate the return that was needed by the client, did we adequately save enough for retirement or to send little Johnny to college.  Each client has a different result that we...