Financial Articles I’m Reading This Week – 12 July 2019

Lots of different topics this week– investing, Mueller, AOC, minimum wage law. If you have to pick one, read the AOC interview at New Yorker.

Financial Articles I’m Reading This Week – 5 July 2019

Really great article from Barron’s this week on an upcoming 401(k) rule change. My take: this change is designed to help insurance salesmen at the expense of retirement savers. Happy Fourth of July!

Financial Mad Libs: How To Recognize and Ignore Them

The online media ecosystem is filled with all kinds of financial news. Quarterly earnings reports, Fed watching, political commentary, early retirement planning, etc. Much of this content is time-wasting at best, and actively harmful to your financial future at worst. But one type of online article that is particularly irksome to me is the Financial Mad Lib. Financial mad libs are automated content (written at least partly by a machine) that use publicly accessible information to stitch together a simple story about a company or economy.

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Financial Articles I’m Reading This Week – 28 June 2019

Financial Articles I’m Reading This Week – 21 June 2019

Two of my favorite investors chat this week! Great stuff. Also an opposing take on my support of stock buybacks.

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Is The New Healthcare Rule A Sly Stimulus Program?

Last week, President Trump announced a change to federal healthcare rules which will affect employers that offer Health Reimbursement Accounts (HRAs). HRAs are vehicles which employers fund with tax-free money for an employee to use to purchase healthcare. Before this recent rule change, HRAs were not allowed to be used to purchase health insurance on the individual market. Starting in 2020, employers will be allowed to fund HRAs instead of offering group insurance policies to their employees.

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Financial Articles I’m Reading This Week – 14 June 2019

Financial Articles I’m Reading This Week – 7 June 2019

Continuing a streak of going heavy on off-topic articles. But… DINOSAURS!!

  • Make School Hard Again. Reason. HT Tyler Cowen.
  • The Day the Dinosaurs Died. New Yorker. “It’s like finding the Holy Grail clutched in the bony fingers of Jimmy Hoffa, sitting on top of the Lost Ark.”
  • Josh Brown: The power of compounding can help you double your money, again and again. CNBC & Ritholz Wealth Management.
  • What a War With Iran Would Look Like. Foreign Affairs. “Even if neither side wants to fight, miscalculation, missed signals, and the logic of escalation could conspire to turn even a minor clash into a regional conflagration.” I’ll add an extra quote, not included in this article, from Eisenhower: “Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. Frankly, I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing.”
  • Maybe Big Businesses Aren’t So Bad At Innovation. Futurity.org. “The idea that large firms can buy small firms to replace their own R&D is just disastrous. If we have to start rebuilding the R&D engine from scratch, it will be impossible,” Knott says. “The second is that large firms shouldn’t try to operate like small firms to become more productive—they already are more productive.”

Political News in 2018 That Mattered To Your Portfolio

Last week I wrote a bit about how many unethical financial advisers make extensive use of pressure sales tactics. Political news items are some of the best tools such advisers have in their kit. Political news has high emotional content for most individual investors, so it’s highly useful as a manipulation tool.

The standard model for a big-box financial adviser is to follow the following game plan:

  1. Call you up to tell you about Political News Item X from this week’s headlines
  2. Suggest a “hedging” or “downside protection” scheme to actively defend your portfolio against this news item
  3. Execute a set of trades (and receive commissions on those trades) to implement this strategy
  4. Repeat again next quarter with a new random news item that sounds scary
Continue reading “Political News in 2018 That Mattered To Your Portfolio”