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Summer Reading
As part of our job as investment managers, we read numerous shareholder letters every year. Occasionally, these letters offer a unique perspective or insight that renews our enthusiasm for how we think about businesses and the art of long-term investing. The most recent letter from Amazon CEO Jeff...
The Graduates’ Trillion Dollar Problem
Over the past few decades, student debt has transformed from a tool for accessing higher education to a significant obstacle preventing young people from accumulating wealth and saving towards retirement. According to a February 2017 report published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,...
How Investing Transformed Over the Century
I recently read a book on the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. The author thoroughly details the lives of some of the affluent passengers who were aboard the luxury liner’s final voyage. As I was learning about these “high net worth” people who lived one hundred years ago, I kept wondering about...
Where We Are in the Cycle
In the fourth-quarter newsletter, we discussed how we think about long-term equity return expectations. The purpose of the article was to explain how fundamental returns (driven by earnings growth) and speculative returns (driven by changes in valuation) collectively impact market prices. While...
Countering Volatility with Counterintuitive Action
My mom asked me once how I swallowed pills. “Show me,” she said. I went through the motions of pretending to put a pill in my mouth, mimed the act of taking a sip of water, then leaned my head back and swallowed. “That’s exactly the opposite of what you should do,” she said. “Instead of leaning...
Have we seen the beginning of the Great Rotation?
Over the past 35 years, interest rates on bonds have been in a gradual decline. The decline in interest rates has gone hand-in-hand with rising bond valuations since bond values move inversely to interest rates. Bond investors have thus enjoyed a long period of rising returns due to market...
Expectations for Future Equity Returns
The S&P 500 reported its eighth consecutive year of positive returns in 2016, a feat last achieved in the 1990’s. That winning streak appeared in question in early November, with the S&P 500 up roughly 2% for the year. As the U.S. Presidential election approached, the consensus among market...
The Benefits of Trusts
Trusts can serve many purposes in a family’s financial, retirement, estate, and tax planning. Trusts can ensure that assets are professionally managed across generations and distributed in line with the grantor’s intentions. Trusts can, among other things, remove assets from one’s estate, carry out...
An Asset Manager Embraces Financial Planning
I have been investing other people’s money for over 36 years. As most of my clients are either saving for retirement or living off of their retirement savings and/or trust accounts, my overriding goal has been to build durable, income-producing portfolios that will enable my clients to live off of...
Chasing Good Companies, Not Yield
In the second quarter newsletter, we noted there were more than $10 trillion of negative-yielding bonds around the world. While U.S. Treasury bonds are not in that group, they are pretty close: the 10-year Treasury currently yields 1.6%, compared to an average of 6.5% over the past 50 years.