The stock market reached yet another record high on Monday, but it just doesn’t seem the same as earlier records. Investors (and everyone else) is starting to wonder if Covid is now endemic – an inherent component of everyday life. Will cases surge the...
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Last week, we wrote about how the damp Boston-area weather matched the soggy stock market. Pressing our literary luck today, the market is following another New England weather meme: “if you don’t like the weather, wait a few minutes.”
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In the Boston area, we’ve had nearly 8 inches of rain so far this month. This 0.7 inches-per-day average compares to the 0.6 inches-per-day average for a monsoon rainforest, the type found in the tropics along the equator. Sounds a lot like the mood...
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The U.S. economy is recovering robustly with promises of ongoing strength as the jobs market recovery accelerates and as international economies more fully reopen.
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In our continuing series on deciding how many positions to hold in a stock portfolio, let’s borrow a page from Major League Baseball (MLB). The methods that these teams use managing their players can be applied to investment portfolios.
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Last week, we started our multi-part discussion on position sizes, and looked at the benefits and weaknesses of an equal-weighted approach. Let’s look at perhaps the most common weighting used by fund managers: relative weighting.
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In most professional and personal endeavors, there are dozens if not hundreds of decisions to make. Manage a tech company? You need to decide who to hire/promote/fire, what responsibilities to give them, how much to pay them (base and bonus), resolve conflicting agendas, what...
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The market seems to have settled into complacency. We’re in a period after first-quarter earnings reports and government statistics indicate a surging economy, yet investors rightfully wonder if or when the Fed will raise interest rates and are starting to consider what happens the...
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Many of our recommended names are at or approaching our price targets. The decision to keep or sell isn’t easy in a strong market. Our patience is being tested (in a good way).
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We’ve written about inflation in the past two letters and promise that we’ll stop with this letter, unless some major news on this front emerges. Yet, what keeps us on the topic is commentary from brokerage firms and media outlets saying that the is...
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Investors have started to see a cloud or two in an otherwise sunny stock market sky. We don’t focus much on short-term market moves, but we have noticed that the weather is shifting, at least slightly.
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We’ve seen signs of it everywhere. Retail prices for homes, apartments, food, gasoline, cars and everyday services are higher than they were a year or two ago and are going higher. Upstream from these consumer-facing prices, input prices for raw materials, semiconductors, crops, energy...
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May hasn’t started out exuberantly, with an early pull-back in the high-momentum tech stocks dragging down the broader indexes.
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When looking at an investment idea, investors may want to replicate this intake process, tweaked of course for a clearly different (and less urgent) task. By using a consistent process, regardless of whether the idea comes from a friend, that off-beat relative, an broker...
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Proxy season is moving into full gear. As a shareholder, you are one of the owners of your companies, so you get to vote on major decisions. Shareholder votes are, of course, much like public government elections, but in most cases your vote a..
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EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, is a straight-forward measure (not a perfect measure, though) of a company’s cash operating profits. But, like seemingly all metrics published by company managements, it is usually adjusted for unusual items that may be non-recurring.
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Determining a company’s underlying value is difficult, and clearly more of an art than a science.
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Stop-losses, or more fully, stop-loss orders, are trading orders that are placed to execute a sale automatically if a stock falls below a specified trigger price. The idea is that these orders can prevent a small loss from becoming a large loss. It also...
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There’s no doubting the dominance achieved by mega-tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google and the other members of the “FANGMAN” club (Microsoft, Apple and Nvidia). Over the past decade or two, these have created entirely new industries, grown to unprecedented size and shareholders...
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Being a contrarian investor often means buying stocks that are outside of the current zeitgeist. Many investors would look at a list of new buys in a contrarian’s portfolio and wonder just what, exactly, the contrarian was thinking. “Why don’t you just buy stocks...
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