Category: Analysis
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Does This Terrify You?
Does it terrify you that this man has the President’s ear in economic matters? Here is a video of President Biden’s Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors trying to explain, well, you use your own judgment. I’m not sure what he’s trying to explain. Does it terrify you that…
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Buffett is Selling Apple. Should You?
In a report released May 4, 2024, Berkshire Hathaway revealed that it has sold about 115 million shares of Apple, for proceeds of about $20 billion. About a year ago, in June 2023, we observed that Apple shareholders had enjoyed a phenomenal run. At that time, about a year ago,…
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Does Economics Explain Why More Pitchers Are Getting Hurt?
The greatest position player of 1970s baseball was probably Henry Aaron who was a major fan draw in ballparks around the league. Among pitchers, in the 60s, Sandy Koufax was the standout, in a decade that also boasted Bob Gibson and Don Drysdale among others. In the 1970s and 80s,…
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Do You Have a “Secretary” Problem?
Many advisors tell us that they have a hard time finding and hiring good team members. This seems to be a bigger problem for small advisors than for larger firms. Based on our observations, we believe that hiring is harder for small firms for several reasons. These reasons mostly have…
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Record-High Gold Prices: Does Gold Belong in An Investment Portfolio?
Gold is trading at record highs, with spot prices exceeding $2250 per ounce as I write this. The chart above might lead you to wonder if you should be investing in gold. In this post, we address two related questions: We’ll first give you the answers, offer brief explanations, and…
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Why Doesn’t Your Client Act? 4 Factors to Guide Financial Decision-Making
Advisors can spend hours explaining a great solution to their clients, only to have those clients not act on the solution. There’s no magic bullet. But sometimes clients appreciate it when their advisor helps them identify what’s making the decision hard. What makes a decision difficult? Decision analysts have found…
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Too Much Risk in US Farmland?
Investor money is pouring into US farmland.[1] That flood of investor money is helping to push farmland prices to record-high levels, and farmland investment yields (as opposed to crop yields) are being pushed to record low levels. For people who have owned farmland for a long time, these factors mean…
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Technical Analysis: Really?
If you’ve studied finance in school, or read books by finance professors, you’ve probably learned that technical analysis “doesn’t work.” In one important sense, that is correct, because when it does work (and it does in the right hands), it tends to produce negative tax consequences (see the end of…