June 2018

Random Task

Investing June 23, 2018

The Thing to Keep in Mind About Knife Fights

Years ago, I had the opportunity to attend some self-defense workshops put on by military and law enforcement.  One class that changed my outlook on life was a knife course.  We were going to learn how law enforcement treats knives and how to work with a knife ourselves.  “The thing to keep in mind about knife fights is that YOU ARE GOING TO GET CUT.”  Wait, what?  This guy was supposed to show us how not to get hurt!  It turns out that it is just incredibly difficult to wrestle around with someone that has a knife and avoid the blade.  You can train all the disarming techniques you want, but in real life blood is drawn almost 100% of the time.  I’ve found that this is a useful way to view conflict in general.  In any conflict, expect pushback whether it’s in sports, telling your 8 year old to…

Matt jr

News, Opinion June 21, 2018

Left of the Decimal

Dow Jones has removed General Electric from the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) and replaced it with Walgreens Boots Alliance.  GE was an original Dow stock and was part of the index for over 100 years.  The Dow is how your parents consume the stock market which is why newscasts tend to report that information in Dow points.  This is a huge deal, right?  Not from an investing standpoint. The DJIA is price-weighted, meaning that stocks with higher prices make up a larger portion of the index than stocks with a lower price.  This is different than an index like the S&P 500 which is market cap-weighted (the size of the actual company).  It’s interesting to note that GE is getting replaced by a company about half its size by market cap so it’s not like GE is getting the boot (pun intended) because of its size, it’s because the…

No Picture

Investing June 13, 2018

Spot the Pattern and Let Me Lie to You

This is actually a post about two different lies.  The first is the lie your brain tells you because it can’t help itself.  The second is a lie investors need to keep an eye out for when presented with market data. Spot the Pattern We all know about the market cycle.  The market goes up.  The market goes down.  There’s a chart that’s basically a sine wave that starts with an upward trend, peaks, reverses, then goes down until it troughs and rebounds to begin the cycle anew.  The market is never that neat, though, right?   Okay, sometimes it is that neat.  This is a beautiful example of the S&P 500 starting in 1997 moving through the cycle.  The first euphoric peak is the tech boom in 2000 followed by the tech crash into despair.  The rebound peaked just before the global financial crisis sent the market back into…