Most Recent Stingy News
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| No longer a serious country |
| 06/08/25 5:29 PM EST | World |
| "Imagine yourself as a foreigner considering investing in the United States. You may well know that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains a 'revenge' provision that would allow the U.S. government to impose extra taxes on foreign investors whose home countries have policies America doesn't like. You probably know that one of Trump's advisers has suggested the forced conversion of short-term debt into century bonds. Once upon a time everyone would have dismissed these things as stuff that couldn't happen in America. Now? Who knows?" |
| More World: Is South Korea the next Japan? |
| No exception |
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| The best withdrawal strategy in retirement |
| 06/08/25 5:26 PM EST | Retirement |
| "According to this report, only 1 in 7 retirees (14%) end up touching their principal during retirement. The rest live on their income (or less than their income) in their golden years. When I first read this statistic I couldn't believe it. The financial industry spends so much time and energy doing all this complicated math and planning on how to spend money in retirement and, yet, the vast majority of retirees ignore it." |
| More Retirement: Generational wealth vs. enough |
| Will you need long-term care? |
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| Missing the market's N best days |
| 06/08/25 5:16 PM EST | Asness |
| "I think the advice to avoid market timing is, for almost everyone, quite good. But the reason to avoid it is that you're likely bad at it and doing it without skill is actually harmful, as you are randomly deviating from a properly diversified portfolio. If you're convinced you're good enough at it, you should do some, but nowhere near the radical asymmetric strategy of being 100% out for only a few months or days. Even if (a giant if) an investor is really good at market timing, nobody is even a small fraction of that good (and why you'd do it by asymmetrically only getting out and never raising the weight perplexes me)." |
| More Asness: Old man yells at the cloud |
| Cliff Asness and three quant crises |
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| It's affordability |
| 06/08/25 5:12 PM EST | Markets |
| "While macro data may point to an economy that appears resilient - with moderate nominal growth, low unemployment, and steady consumer spending - beneath the surface, an affordability crisis is building. Though it may spare those with inflated assets, it is marginalizing and demoralizing a vital portion of the U.S. population." |
| More Markets: Drawdowns and recoveries |
| Buying the dip wins again |
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| Drawdowns and recoveries |
| 06/02/25 6:28 PM EST | Markets |
| "Long-term investors need to be aware of the pattern of drawdowns and be prepared to face them when they inevitably occur. The best investors and stocks suffer through large drawdowns, which can be considered a cost of doing business over the long haul. The median drawdown for the 6,500 stocks in our sample from 1985-2024 was 85 percent and took 2.5 years from peak to trough. More than one-half of all stocks never recover to their prior highs. Relative to smaller drawdowns, larger drawdowns, on average, take longer to occur, recover to the previous peak less often, and yet can provide attractive returns off the lows. Recoveries from drawdowns of all sizes have significant skewness, which means some stocks do extremely well relative to the pack. As a result, average returns from rebounds are higher than median returns." |
| More Markets: Buying the dip wins again |
| Profitability retrospective |
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| Generational wealth vs. enough |
| 06/02/25 6:26 PM EST | Retirement |
| "The concept of enough is perhaps best explained by Joseph Heller. Authors Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller were at a party given by a hedge fund manager on a fancy island in New York. Vonnegut pointed out that the host had made more money in a single day than Heller had made with all of the sales of his popular book Catch-22 in his entire lifetime. Heller responded, 'Yes, but I have something he will never have"enough!' I'm pretty sure that speaker had never heard this story, or if he had, he thought, 'That's nuts, why would someone not want more?'" |
| More Retirement: Will you need long-term care? |
| Tasting retirement |
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| The lowest risk-free rate |
| 06/02/25 6:22 PM EST | Behaviour |
| "What is the lowest risk-free, after-tax, after-inflation rate of return you would accept in order to forgo all other investment opportunities for the rest of your life?" |
| More Behaviour: A price on mental freedom |
| Housel on the decline |
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| Is South Korea the next Japan? |
| 06/02/25 6:12 PM EST | World |
| "South Korea's equity market looks like an exaggerated version of the Japanese stock market. Japan has a massive pool of companies trading at below 1x price-to-book, but South Korea has an even larger share. And while Japan is famous for its “lost decades,” the Japanese market has taken a sharp upward turn, while the South Korean market continues to languish." |
| More World: No exception |
| Germans are reluctant to invest in stocks |
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| How flows change factor performance |
| 05/20/25 2:44 PM EST | Value Investing |
| "What I find particularly interesting, though, is that the study also estimates cross-factor impacts. If more money flows into momentum stocks, the expensive stocks tend to get more expensive while the cheap stocks tend to get cheaper. This should increase the return potential for value investors. Indeed, the chart below shows that if 1% of the total market flows into momentum portfolios, then the return outlook of the value factor increases but 0.6% per year. Similarly, the return outlook for small cap investors increases as well, while quality factor portfolios see their return prospects diminished because quality factor portfolios have large overlaps with momentum factor portfolios." |
| More Value Investing: US value trading at a discount |
| Just inside the zone |
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| A price on mental freedom |
| 05/20/25 2:43 PM ESY | Behaviour |
| "Today, I don't make active investments because you can't put a price on mental freedom. What I've realized about myself (and many others I've spoken to) is that when you buy an active investment like an individual stock, that investment consumes a lot of your attention." |
| More Behaviour: Housel on the decline |
| Don't push it |
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| Buying the dip wins again |
| 05/20/25 2:42 PM EST | Markets |
| "Retail investors have won again. When trade tensions flared in early April and about $6.6 trillion in market value vanished from US stocks in just two business days - the fifth-worst two-day drop since the S&P 500's creation in 1957 - they didn't panic. Instead, they did what they've learned to do over the past 15 years: They bought the dip. Six weeks later, the US stocks benchmark has not only recovered but surpassed its pre-tariff levels, delivering a gain of about 17% from the lows to those who kept their nerve." |
| More Markets: Profitability retrospective |
| Mr Market rules |
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| Profitability retrospective |
| 05/20/25 2:40 PM EST | Markets |
| "rofitability subsumes all the quality factor, explaining both the performance of the strategies the investment industry market and the factors that academics employ"none of the quality factors generated significant positive alpha relative to profitability, the other Fama and French factors, and momentum. The pricing of the quality factors was primarily through significant positive loadings on profitability. Thus, instead of focusing on various quality metrics, investors can concentrate on a company's ability to generate profits." |
| More Markets: Mr Market rules |
| Beanie babies + bimetallism |
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| Will you need long-term care? |
| 05/20/25 2:38 PM EST | Retirement |
| "A recent update of these data show that only about a fifth of retirees will need no assistance at all during their lives and a fifth will need extensive services. The remaining 60 percent of seniors will have either low (25 percent) or moderate care needs (37 percent)." |
| More Retirement: Tasting retirement |
| Set for life? |
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| The rule of law |
| 05/20/25 2:33 PM EST | Crime |
| "It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security. He is at all times surrounded by unknown enemies, whom, though he never provoked, he can never appease, and from whose injustice he can be protected only by the powerful arm of the civil magistrate continually held up to chastise it. The acquisition of valuable and extensive property, therefore, necessarily requires the establishment of civil government." |
| More Crime: Paid to not understand it |
| Avoiding bad guys |
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| Mr Market rules |
| 05/12/25 3:37 PM EST | Markets |
| "The curious thing about financial markets is that they do not respond to what most of us would regard as news." |
| More Markets: Beanie babies + bimetallism |
| US treasuries, deficits and credibility |
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| Beanie babies + bimetallism |
| 05/12/25 3:27 PM EST | Markets |
| "Beanie Babies in the 1990s were a classic bubble involving small stuffed animal toys. The bubble featured a seemingly scarce commodity and an exciting new trading and communications technology, the internet. Early buyers were richly rewarded by price increases, attracting more buyers. Burton and Jacobsen (1999) estimate that the annual returns on Beanie Babies were between 159% and 176% from 1994 to 1999. But the bubble collapsed after 1999, perhaps because Beanie Babies offered no vision of social justice." |
| More Markets: US treasuries, deficits and credibility |
| Suffering in private |
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| US treasuries, deficits and credibility |
| 05/12/25 3:21 PM EST | Markets |
| "The damage has been done. How much? Aside from higher yield and a lower stock market it's hard to measure. You also have constant attacks on institutions. The next couple months will be very noisy. You have tariffs and trade talk, tax bill, inflation, a massive unsustainable deficit and an economic slowdown. Followed by midterms elections. Mistakes have been made and that increased pain for the people. This is about a country's reputation." |
| More Markets: Suffering in private |
| Got diversification |
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| Go for the gold |
| 05/12/25 3:19 PM EST | Gold |
| "There is no math that an investor can do to determine an appropriate price for gold. It's worth only what other investors are willing to pay for it, and that, in my view, is why its price can fluctuate so widely." |
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| Do it for the kids |
| 05/12/25 3:17 PM EST | Books |
| "Welcome to the Jonathan Clements Getting Going on Savings Initiative and the accompanying book, The Best of Jonathan Clements: Classic Columns on Money and Life. The savings initiative aims to get young adults started in the financial markets with $1,000 contributions to Roth IRAs, with those contributions funded by both direct donations and the royalties from the book. The book consists of more than 60 of my old Wall Street Journal columns." |
| More Books: The trading game |
| Die with zero |
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| Berkshire Hathaway 2025 AGM |
| 05/05/25 7:26 PM EST | Buffett |
| "Warren Buffett presides over the 2025 Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting" [video] |
| More Buffett: Cash |
| Warren Buffett at BRK's AGM |
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| Be minimally extractive |
| 05/05/25 7:22 PM EST | Thrift |
| "The late Jack Bogle, founder of Vanguard, did more to help the individual investor than anyone in history. And since this week marks the 50-year anniversary of Vanguard's founding, I thought it would be nice to illustrate the unrivaled impact that Bogle had on the investment industry." |
| More Thrift: Advice for the kids |
| Spending rules |
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