What We're Reading

With the “FANG” trade getting long in the tooth, so to speak, Wall Street analysts are now scrambling to formulate new acronyms to accommodate the most robust names in Big Tech today. FAANG, FAAA, FAAMG and now FANTASY have been brought forward adding companies like Microsoft, Tesla and Nvidia to the original FANG Fab-Four of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google.

As market warning signs so, they don’t get better than this. Widely accepted market acronyms don’t evolve gracefully. They pop. Remember the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and NINJA loans – (No income, no job)?

What most investors miss is that universally understood and enthusiastically embraced acronyms reflect peak sentiment. They are a market narrative boiled down to its most simplistic and easiest to grasp form. Repeated over and over and appearing everywhere, they are cognitive ease at its best. Like pieces of sea glass, all of the rough edges have been worn away over time and everyone can hold them.

In my book

Rules and regulations exist to let us know what behaviors we should expect from the people we do business with. Sometimes, good sense or social convention overtake these rules — and they don’t matter so much. Just about everyone wears seat-belts these days (we all know how much they improve our odds of survival in an accident); the ranks of underage smokers have plummeted (it’s no longer cool). Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, as they say, there’s no cramming it back in.

Such is the case with the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule. On Friday, President Trump asked the Labor Department to review the rule, which requires brokers working with retirement savers to put the interest of their clients ahead of their own. After years of work on it, the regulation was finalized last year by the Obama administration.

At first blush, this looks like a big way the Trump administration could directly affect everyday investors. As it turns out, whether the fidicuary rule hurts you isn’t up

A reader asked the other day, "How much time do you need before you can separate skill versus luck in investing?" 

My answer was "probably 20-30 years," which he found astounding. He thought I'd say five years. But here's my reasoning. 

If a doctor performed one successful surgery, you can be pretty sure he's an expert. If he does one successful surgery every day for a year, he clearly knows what he's doing.

Investing is different. There are thousands of stocks, and at any given time, a fair number of them will be exploding higher. With millions of investors, some will be holding disproportionate amounts of those winners at any given moment. It can take five or 10 years of successful returns for an investor to make a case that results aren't entirely due to chance.

But even then -- with, say a 10-year track record of success -- an investor can't claim expertise. Or at least reliable expertise you'd expect from a doctor or an engineer. That's because the world is always changing, and th

Intellectually I knew there were two forms of market participants already: price-sensitive “investors” and price-insensitive “traders”.  The former buys low and sells high, and has a process for determining why they are doing so.  The latter sells low and covers lower, or buys high and sells higher.  Both are entirely legitimate ways to make returns in any market, but it’s important to distinguish between them; who you listen to and surround yourself with will inform your market view and trading positions.  When the stock market opened for its “Black Monday” on August 24th, those selling were “traders”, whether they want to admit it or not.  They didn’t care what level prices were at, just that they were going down. “Get me out, NOW!!!”  Those who were in buying blue chip, mega-cap, high quality secular growth stories at 10 or 20% discounts to that day’s close? They were investors.  More on this below, but when you’re in a crash, make sure that you’re not trying to inform investing dec