“Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1” -Warren Buffett The most important part of investing is to avoid losses. This is why I so often use this blog to talk about the risks I’m seeing. If you can avoid the landmines and diversify among the rest, you’ll do pretty well. What…
As a follow-up on my last post which you can read here, I wanted to discuss the important difference between a company and a stock when investing. The old adage of “invest in what you know and buy” is very general and only goes so far. I would also say that it’s not nearly as…
It was announced yesterday that Microsoft is buying LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. A lot of people are questioning the deal but I think Andrew Ross Sorkin hit the nail on the head regarding LinkedIn’s decision to sell – to get out of the accounting hole they were digging with massive amounts of stock based compensation and…
Most of the activity in portfolios lately has been selling covered stock options to boost the yield on our holdings (attn clients: I’ll be discussing this in more detail with examples in this month’s video update). I did make two purchases in the last week that I wanted to bring to your attention though. First,…
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the types of investments that offer the best risk adjusted returns in this environment. One of the toughest things to evaluate today, and perhaps the most important when investing in stocks, is the sustainability of a company’s business model, cash flows and profits. Technology continues to change things…
Once again, I’ve been very pleased with the earnings and outlook reported by the majority of the companies we own. A few of our core holdings held their conference calls this morning so I wanted to provide a quick update. CF Industries (CF) & Terra Nitrogen (TNH) CF is our largest “Growth” holding and TNH…
A few quick updates: Growth Allocation I bought a position in Check Point Software Technology (CHKP) this morning after the stock got knocked down following their earnings release. Check Point is one of the oldest Cybersecurity companies out there and is the global leader in unified threat management (UTM) – things like firewalls, network security,…
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about portfolio construction, especially for retirees, in these computer-algorithm dominated investment markets which swing wildly every time someone from the Fed speaks. Markets today are unbelievably short-term focused and my clients aren’t paying me to day-trade their retirement portfolios. This means that portfolios which are built with a long-term…