It’s morally wrong to enjoy the benefits of something while leaving others to accept all the risks. This is the central theme of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s latest work, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, a book that should be required reading for anyone in public office or in any position of authority or...Read More

  The following is an excerpt from 5 “Oddball” Dividend Stocks With Big Yields, originally published on Kiplinger’s. It’s not the easiest market out there for income investors. With bond yields being depressed for so many years (and still extremely low by any historical standard) investors have scoured the globe for yield, which has pushed...Read More

The Oracle of Omaha made a very public bet with Protégé Partners on December 19, 2007 that over the following 10 years, an unmanaged S&P 500 index fund would outperform a collection of five high-profile fund-of-funds. Buffett won the bet… and it wasn’t even close. The S&P 500 returned a cumulative 125.8% (or 8.5% per...Read More

It’s ‘all a bit upside down’ on market reactions to inflation outlook from CNBC.   Right now, it’s all about bond yields. The U.S. market has been extremely expensive by historical standards for several years now. Throwing out one popular valuation metric, the 10-year CAPE is sitting at 1998 levels. By some metrics (median price/sales...Read More

I always try to read everything that Jeremy Grantham’s GMO publishes, but I somehow missed this one until it was republished on Meb Faber’s Idea Farm. Good stuff: Don’t Act Like Stalin. Lot’s of good takeaways (as always). GMO’s main point was that chasing recent performance is a game you can’t win. All good strategies...Read More

Prospect Capital’s (PSEC) latest earnings release didn’t do much to improve investor sentiment toward the stock. It remains mired in trading range and sits are barely 70% of book value. PSEC has long been accused of being a little more aggressive than its peers in valuing its assets. But even so, at these levels it...Read More

Stock buybacks get a bad reputation — and justifiably so. It seems that for most companaies, a share repurchase is little more than an expensive mop to soak up share dilution from executive stock options or other share-based compensation. So, it’s refreshing to see a company like LyondellBasell Industries (LYB). When Lyondell announces a share...Read More

With market volatility picking up this past week, now is as good a time as any to review why it’s important to take your losses early. If you lose 10%-20% in a trade, it’s not that hard to recover. It only takes 11% – 25% to get back to where you started. But if you...Read More

I joined Oriel Morrison and Martin Soong on CNBC this evening to chat about the market. It’s feeling a bit like the 1990s these days! Is this market a return to the 1990s? from CNBC.   This article first appeared on Sizemore Insights as It&#...Read More

Photo credit: Sean Davis Hedge funds don’t get a lot of love these days. They’ve underperformed for years, and their fees — the standard is 2% of assets and 20% of profits — make them a pariah in the age of indexing and low-cost robo advisors. Hey, I get it. The high fees and lousy...Read More