August 2017

No Picture

News August 26, 2017

Weekend Reads

Some fun reads and shameless self-promotion I take the L on high yield A discussion of taxing bitcoin.  Isn’t avoiding tax part of the point of an anonymous currency? Bill Nye may have had his face ripped off by Hollywood accounting Shocker: A third of high-end real estate deals may be shady Babylon’s nerds went base 60 – this is super cool The Northeast Ohio PKD walk is coming up soon.  Share my son’s story! Please send thoughts and prayers to those in the path of Hurricane Harvey, too.

take the l

Due Diligence, Investing August 25, 2017

Wrongness and a Strange Animal

Investing is such a strange animal.  You can be wrong and still make money.  You can be right and still lose money. I have been wrong on high yield bonds for the last couple of years.  I didn’t like the energy component of the space.  Oil prices were falling due to the shale revolution and it looked like companies that had sold bonds to make ends meet were overextended.  I feared that just a couple of bankruptcies could spread to the entire high yield space, dragging everything down. That didn’t happen.  Despite some private equity funds over-reaching, the space mostly adapted to low oil prices by cutting costs and developing technology to get oil out of the ground more efficiently.  Investors continued to buy up high yield bonds in a chase for yield. I was wrong, but I’m happy to take the L on my record for this one.  Piling…

Second Grade

News, Opinion August 22, 2017

For William’s First Day of Second Grade

Today’s post is a departure from the norm of investment news and snark.  I’m going to share a bit about my son, William, and ask you to spend a minute of your day to think about his cause. William was born in 2010 with Autosomal Recessive Polycystic Kidney Disease, or ARPKD.  We spent his first days with him in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).  He was in a plastic box and a machine was helping him breathe.  These were critical days.  We couldn’t hold our son.  He was cradled by a tangle of tubes and monitoring cables.  Most of all, the sounds will stick with me.  The beepbeepbeepBOOP alert of his pulsox unit, the inflating of the blood pressure cuff every 15 minutes, and assorted klaxons and pings haunt me.  You wonder if this alert is the big one.  What’s wrong?  And we were powerless to do anything, wondering if…

No is the Secret Sauce

Due Diligence, Investing August 15, 2017

No, the Secret Sauce

“I thought you guys had some sort of insider’s edge and that’s how you get returns for your clients’ investments…?” My friend was grilling up burgers and dogs for his kid’s birthday party while picking my brain about investing.  He was surprised to find out how vanilla our investment philosophy is.  No secret sauce.  No insider tips.  I don’t know a guy who knows a guy.  Just control what you can control.  A sensible asset allocation and a financial plan puts you ahead of most people. He was right, though.  We do have a special investment technique. We say no. We say no to high-cost, low value-add money managers.  No to the absurd, overly-complicated, sketchy, and irrelevant.  It’s not always an easy no, though.  In some cases, we have to work to get to no. In 2012, we were pitched an energy LP.  It was a helluva pitch.  Polished presentation….

Reese is a good dog!

Opinion August 11, 2017

Who is Holding Your Leash?

On PIMCO’s blog, Gene Frieda writes that “markets do not explode every time volatility is low, but volatility has always been extremely low when markets have exploded.”  This reminded me of the variable or intermittent reward system I stumbled upon when researching training techniques for my dog. The idea is that instead of getting a reward every time the dog performs the desired behavior, you reward on a variable schedule.  For example, you’d reward a treat for every 5 times the dog performed the ‘sit’ command properly.  Sometimes you reward after 3 sits, sometimes you reward after 7 sits, but it averages out to every 5 sits.  Here’s the crazy thing: it works on people, too.  Casinos have understood this for a long time.  This is also why your significant other is on social media during dinner.  They are looking for that dopamine hit that social media provides randomly. I…

No Picture

Investing, Opinion August 4, 2017

Chasing Risk

  I read the Howard Marks memo last weekend and you should, too, if you haven’t already.  The memo got me to revisit some of my investing viewpoints.  It’s easy to listen to the same investment philosophy on repeat.  My fear is that one day I’ll look up and find that everyone’s streaming their investment philosophy on their phones while I’m listening to a walkman.  So I read everything I can.  Howard Marks is one of the very best.  He’s usually a bit cerebral for me, but the latest memo is perfect.  I ran out of highlighter halfway through my first read. Right off the bat he lays out four conditions that he sees in the market: unusual uncertainties, low prospective returns, high asset prices, and rampant pro-risk behavior.  I don’t agree with him on the first two points, but asset prices do seem high.  I have a man-crush on…