Remember what television was like in the 1970s? There were no DVD players, not even VHS players yet -- you watched what was on when it was broadcast. If a movie came to television, it was over a broadcast network (no Netflix). For much of the 1970s, there wasn't even cable television, so you were stuck with a handful of VHF broadcast stations and...
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Don't fear the current recession drumbeat
Recently, the "recession drumbeat" of those warning of the growing risk of a recession has been growing louder and louder.Yesterday, for example, the stock market rallied strongly on negative comments from Fed Vice Chairman Donald Kohn, which market participants took as signaling a probable rate cut in the upcoming Fed meeting on December 11.Today's...
Monday, November 26, 2007
Would you prefer options linked to your company or to the S&P 500?
In December 2006, this article appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine typifying the kind of journalism that surrounds the "active versus passive" debate.The article recounts the education of "hundreds of impetuous young multimillionaires" at Google who were given lectures on the superiority of index investing from Bill Sharpe, Burton Malkiel,...
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Happy Thanksgiving to all
As we head into Thanksgiving, many of the economic commentaries you hear on the radio or on the financial news media will be focusing on "Black Friday" (so named because retailers supposedly spend the entire year up to Thanksgiving "in the red," and then go "in the black" in a rush of post-Thanksgiving shopping).Accompanying all this talk of Black...
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Malpass hits nail on head
In his most recent Forbes opinion, Bear Stearns Chief Economist David Malpass hits the nail on the head.He points to "the uncertainty in U.S. tax rates and the scheduled tax rate increases" as underlying explanations of what ails U.S. markets here in the last months of 2007.We agree, and point out that we sounded the same note last week in a blog...
Monday, November 19, 2007
A word about insurance
Late last evening I received terrible news about the medical prognosis of a friend.
I don't talk about life insurance with my friends, but I know a lot about life insurance. Life insurance is not something you really discuss with your friends, even if you are in the habit of discussing the markets or specific investments with them...
Friday, November 16, 2007
Gambling, Speculation, and Investment
We draw a very important distinction between gambling, speculation, and investment.Today, many prospective investors do not understand this distinction, largely because the term "investment" is often misapplied to activities which should more properly be identified as speculation, or even as gambling, as we explained in a Taylor Frigon commentary...
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Don't hire a journalist to coach your team
Wealth management has become a buzzword among retail financial services firms.The previous post outlined how wealth management -- which we call wealth allocation planning and capital management -- is a critical concept that encompasses investment management as a subset. If capital management is the science of examining your overall wealth allocation...
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Manage your Capital
Investment management is a very important subject. It refers to the process by which you make your buy-and-sell decisions on financial securities over the years.
Important as it is, however, it is only part of the entire picture.
Your financial market investments are only part of your overall capital, and the financial markets are...
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Video Games and the Future of Computing
Video games have come a long way in the past twenty-five years!The inimitable Peter Huber has this noteworthy post on Forbes online, dated yesterday.It is worth a read on several levels, but one of the most important is the "entrepreneurial" level. Huber is describing the possibilities raised by "two woeful deficiencies" in digital life, and opening...
Monday, November 12, 2007
What's really troubling the market?
As explained in the previous post, at Taylor Frigon Capital Management we do not advise families to build their investment foundations on an attempt to predict this cycle or that cycle. All the loudspeakers of the giant financial retail firms and the financial news media are constantly blaring a message that you have to time cycles -- cycles of the...
Friday, November 09, 2007
The Classic Growth Stock Investment Philosophy
Taylor Frigon Capital Management LLC has deep roots in investment management.Our investment philosophy is directly descended from the growth stock theory developed in the late 1930s by Thomas Rowe Price, Jr.Because Mr. Price was a money manager and not an academic, he did not publish books or dissertations about growth stock investing. He produced...
