No, it only seems like I’ve been writing this blog for 200 years. I’ve actually been writing it for 200 weeks. As the anniversary approached, I naturally gave some thought about how to celebrate it, and my first notion was to give myself the week off. But nobody gets time…
We’ve talked about school desegregation and we’ve talked about the fight against discrimination, two highly desirable movements that were, unfortunately, built on the backs of working families, leaving the elites who sponsored them untouched. Unsurprisingly, many of those working families now support Donald Trump and, whether he wins or loses,…
Let’s talk about discrimination. I had a friend, now deceased, we’ll call Millie. Millie grew up in a wealthy and influential family and graduated from law school in the 1930s — a real gender pioneer. But getting a law degree and getting a law job were two different things. Whenever Millie would…
I’ll be talking about delicate issues in these posts, so let me be clear about what I’m saying — and what I’m not. Hundreds of years from now, when historians look back on our era — say, the period beginning just after World War II — the glory of our time won’t have anything to do…
One reason I dislike Trump but also dislike his elite critics is because I have the misfortune to live in both camps. If you merely took a quick, casual glance at my vita you might conclude (as I try to trick everybody into concluding) that I am a card-carrying member…
Right-thinking person that I am, I’ve spent my adult life in broad agreement with elite American opinion on all the major issues and movements of the age: opposition to the War in Vietnam, support for the Civil Rights Movement, gender equity, reproductive rights, immigration reform, environmentalism, equality for gays, lesbians,…
“The fundamental decisions affecting the lives of … colonized people are made and implemented by the … rulers in pursuit of interests that are often defined in a distant metropolis. Rejecting cultural compromises with the colonized population, the colonizers are convinced of their own superiority and their ordained mandate to…
The European political elite [has developed] a habit of profound disrespect for public opinion and democratic process – John Plender in the Financial Times
On Friday morning, June 24, 2016, the entire Euro-American establishment woke up to find that, contrary to their strict instructions, the British had voted to leave the EU.
In a low return environment, investors need to do things differently if we want to have any hope of growing our capital. Many of these different things – the ones I’ve already talked about – have to do with playing offense in a smarter way. We’ve examined using more aggressive…
In my recent posts we’ve looked at various strategies investors might turn to if we find ourselves mired in a long period of unacceptably low investment returns. We’ve evaluated higher equity allocations, taking better advantage of the return premium associated with illiquid investments, and departing from indexing to try to…
We’ve looked at two options for our portfolios if, as seems likely, we are entering into a period of historically low returns: more aggressive allocations to equities, and taking better advantage of illiquid assets. We now turn to the question of alpha.
