A typical piece of financial advice is to reduce your equity allocation as you age.  When you are young, there is plenty of time to recover from a market debacle.  Not so much if the debacle occurs after you are already retired.  One rule of thumb is that your equity allocation should be 100 minus… Read more

Ezekial Emanuel is an oncologist and professor of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania.  He was also one of the principal architects of the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) and has recently been appointed to Joe Biden’s COVID Task Force.  A few years ago he penned an article for the Atlantic Magazine entitled “Why I… Read more

Democratic candidates for President in 2020 have put forth numerous innovative policy proposals.  One of these is a tax on wealth (the Wealth Tax).  Bernie Sanders’s plan called for a 2% annual tax on net worth between $50 million and $1 billion, 4% on net worth between $1 billion and $10 billion, and 8% on… Read more

An index fund is a portfolio that aims to mimic as possible a designated index, generally a broad-based stock or bond index.  For example, some of the most popular index funds target the Standard and Poor’s index of 500 large stocks.  The SP500 is a market capitalization weighted index.  This means that the weight of… Read more

Phil Fisher is widely credited with being the father of growth stock investing.  He started an investment partnership in 1931 and ran it for 60 years.  He wrote the book Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and advocated running a very concentrated portfolio of no more than five stocks. Phil’s son Ken started his investment management… Read more

John Bogle died earlier this year at the age of 89.  According to legendary investor Warren Buffett, Bogle created more wealth for investors than anyone else in history.  A few years ago, I wrote an essay about John Bogle and the company he founded – Vanguard.  Here is a brief excerpt John C. (Jack) Bogle… Read more

One of the top performing companies for the past fifty-plus years has been Berkshire Hathaway (stock symbol BRKA), managed the entire time by Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett.  BRKA is a holding company with wholly owned stakes in operating companies (for example, See’s Candies) and stock investments in other public companies (for example, Wells Fargo… Read more

According to founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, the long-term future for Amazon is that it will fail one day. In one sense, this statement is not remarkable.  Nothing is forever.  Eventually, every company will fail (except, maybe, too-big-to-fail banks).  But I wonder what this says about the buy and hold investment strategy.  After all, if… Read more

Late on a Sunday night in September of 2008 the third largest investment bank in the US, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.  The filing followed failed efforts to find a buyer for the company, an equity investor, or to convince the Federal Reserve to extend credit.  The immediate cause was a “run” by private creditors… Read more

My last few essays have focused on the 10% upper tail of the wealth or income distribution.    People generally acknowledge that the top ten percent are doing great.  Perhaps this is true by definition.  If they were doing poorly, they would not be in the top 10%!  What about the other 90%?  Let’s start with… Read more