Most Recent Stingy News
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| Why diversification is difficult |
| 04/21/25 2:56 PM EST | Indexing |
| "Diversification isn't about return, it's about risk. It's about smoothing out the financial ride over your lifetime. You know this already. That's the easy part. The hard part is sticking with it even as you underperform in most years. As Brian Portnoy brilliantly stated, 'Diversification means always having to say you're sorry.' And it's true. Most of the time you will feel sorry that you didn't do as well as your best asset class. You'll feel sorry that one (or more) of your positions lost money. And so forth. But this is to be expected. This is what we pay for the benefits of diversification. This is the price of peace." |
| More Indexing: School is in |
| Paying your tuition |
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| School is in |
| 04/21/25 2:54 PM EST | Indexing |
| "These policy shifts are a reminder that, even when everyone seems to agree, things can change. That's why I believe it's best never to go too far out on a limb with investment choices. Nothing is guaranteed." |
| More Indexing: Paying your tuition |
| Index three ways |
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| A quantum of confusion |
| 04/21/25 2:52 PM EST | Markets |
| "My view is that the quantum confusion of 2024 is a symptom of the general degradation of U.S. stock market quality, part of the 'Koreafication' process where the market becomes more retail dominated. I don't want to overstate the quantitative significance of this trend, because as shown in Figure 2, it's mostly confined to small-cap stocks. But it appears that bizarre pricing previously confined to pink sheet stocks is now visible in listed smaller names." |
| More Markets: Buy the bottomless pit |
| Here we go |
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| Why a 4.4% yield might barely deliver |
| 04/21/25 2:50 PM EST | Bonds |
| "At first glance, a 4.4% bond yield seems attractive, especially after years of near-zero interest rates. But hidden beneath the surface, taxes and inflation are silently eroding your returns. By the time they take their cut, that 'safe' yield could leave you with nothing- or worse, less than you started with." |
| More Bonds: U.S. floats idea of defaulting on treasuries |
| Remember the global financial crisis |
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| Buy the bottomless pit |
| 04/13/25 2:46 PM EST | Markets |
| "A basic property of optimal decision-making is that you should act more conservatively when you have less accurate information. As of April 2025, we're confronted with a situation where we have very little historical precedent and the outcomes we observe are extremely volatile. As a logical consequence, we should be cautious in responding to events." |
| More Markets: Here we go |
| When does the market recover? |
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| Housel on the decline |
| 04/13/25 2:44 PM EST | Behaviour |
| "Napoleon's definition of a military genius was quote, the man who can do the average thing when everyone else around him is losing his mind. I'm gonna repeat that because it is such a ridiculously good quote. A military genius is the man who can do the average thing when everyone else around him is losing his mind. It is the exact same in investing to be a good investor over time. You don't need to make a lot of genius decisions. You just need to be merely average when everyone else is making bad decisions, as many people are." |
| More Behaviour: Don't push it |
| The Squid Game market |
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| Here we go |
| 04/13/25 1:53 PM EST | Markets |
| "But whatever you are focused on, and whichever region you choose to invest in, our best advice is to chill. Don't panic. Don't overreact. Don't pretend like you know where things are immediately going. Don't think that you need to. You don't." |
| More Markets: When does the market recover? |
| Courageously losing your money |
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| When does the market recover? |
| 04/13/25 1:42 PM EST | Markets |
| "it's the perfect time to examine how long U.S. stocks typically take to recover from such a decline. Knowing this information can help you set the right expectations about what might happen next in the stock market. And, with the right expectations, it's much easier to stay invested for the long term." |
| More Markets: Courageously losing your money |
| Trend following is harder |
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| Don't push it |
| 04/13/25 1:28 PM EST | Behaviour |
| "We can control how much risk we take, the investment costs we incur, and our own buying and selling. But we can't control the behavior of other investors, as reflected in ever-fluctuating stock and bond prices." |
| More Behaviour: The Squid Game market |
| Four thoughts |
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| War on the world |
| 04/04/25 6:50 PM EST | World |
| "Dr. Rob Shapiro talks about Trump's trade war on the world." [video] |
| More World: Back to the bronze age |
| Mad King Trump |
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| Back to the bronze age |
| 04/04/25 6:37 PM EST | World |
| "Advanced economies, even those, such as Germany, with large trade surpluses, have seen a steadily declining factory share. Advanced economies do better focusing on higher-value jobs such as AI, and on the requisite education for their workers, not on repressing their strengths in a futile effort to return to a proto-Bronze Age. Moreover, manufacturers are customers for a large share of US imports, thus the Trump tariffs punish the sectors he imagines he is helping." |
| More World: Mad King Trump |
| UBS Yearbook 2025 |
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| US value trading at a discount |
| 04/04/25 5:53 PM EST | Value Investing |
| "While the future is unknowable, the best investors can do is to put the odds in their favor. And current valuations suggest the likelihood that value stocks will outperform over the long term." |
| More Value Investing: Just inside the zone |
| Fairfax Week 2025 |
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| The acquirer |
| 04/04/25 5:51 PM EST | Management |
| "The story of how Hiroshi Nojima turned a sleepy family business into one of the top performers on the Tokyo Stock Exchange" |
| More Management: Ghost jobs |
| You cannot cut your way to profitability |
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| Set for life? |
| 04/04/25 5:46 PM EST | Retirement |
| "Under what circumstances could you be 'set for life' with $2M at age 23, and under which circumstances would you not be. Let's dig in." |
| More Retirement: Never root for a recession |
| Spending it |
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| Courageously losing your money |
| 03/30/25 3:32 PM EST | Markets |
| "I explain why concentration is bad and diversification is good. I start by assessing the arguments in favor of concentrated portfolios, including the deluded belief that concentration brings both high return and low risk. I review the extensive record of client wealth destroyed by overconfident concentrators, and then discuss the conceptual errors underlying the enduring appeal of concentration." |
| More Markets: Trend following is harder |
| How bubbles grow |
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| Trend following is harder |
| 03/30/25 3:30 PM EST | Markets |
| "Trend following is not for the faint of heart. While it can reduce the overall volatility of your portfolio during extended declines, it can also create anxiety and stress with its constant false positives, missed recoveries, and delayed outperformance. Whether such a strategy fits into your portfolio and lifestyle is up to you." |
| More Markets: How bubbles grow |
| The index inclusion effect is dead |
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| Just inside the zone |
| 03/30/25 3:28 PM EST | Value Investing |
| "In our opinion, the best time to buy a cyclical stock is when the company's profits are in decline and its industry is in recession. In effect, buy during the bust, not the boom. Of course, this is much easier said than done." |
| More Value Investing: Fairfax Week 2025 |
| Wealth or inflation |
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| Mad King Trump |
| 03/30/25 3:22 PM EST | World |
| "They expected a replay of the laissez-faire policies of Trump's first term - a lot of bombastic rhetoric but few real policy changes and a lot of small, quiet deregulatory moves. Instead, they got a very different Trump this time - one who's intent on breaking the American economy in the service of ideology." |
| More World: UBS Yearbook 2025 |
| Valuations reflect exceptionalism |
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| Waymos crash less than humans |
| 03/30/25 3:20 PM EST | Tech |
| "Based on insurance industry records, Waymo and Swiss Re estimate that human drivers in San Francisco and Phoenix would generate about 26 successful bodily injury claims over 25 million miles of driving. So even if both of the pending claims against Waymo succeed, two injuries represent a more than 90 percent reduction in successful injury claims relative to typical human drivers." |
| More Tech: The algorithms are broken |
| Man vs. machine |
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| Paying your tuition |
| 03/30/25 2:35 PM EST | Indexing |
| "The one thing about the stock market that's predictable is its unpredictability. New crises frequently come along, and each is different enough to give investors renewed anxiety. In dealing with these crises, what's most important? In my opinion, it's perspective. Good investors have a sense of market history that can help them navigate crises better than other investors." |
| More Indexing: Index three ways |
| Problems with passive investing |
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| Rebuffed: options-based strategies |
| 03/24/25 4:33 PM EST | Funds |
| "By and large, options-based strategies have not been effective tools to achieve better risk/return outcomes. And this is unlikely some fluke of the past five years. Economic theory would argue investors should have expected this result, and that they should going forward, too." |
| More Funds: Persistent alpha |
| Frequent fees matter more |
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