This year, Thanksgiving comes during a time of economic fear and uncertainty.Market drops have been as brutal as any in the past hundred years, and dire economic commentary can be heard on the news around the clock.Bearish commentators are having their day, taking credit for predicting the current crisis. Now many are using their media platform to...
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Stimulus package, revisited
Today in the Wall Street Journal, Stanford University economist John Taylor explains why the first "stimulus package" didn't work, and why a new and larger one won't either. John Taylor is the author of the so-called "Taylor Rule" for fiscal policy which is cited in virtually any economic textbook you can find.In an opinion piece called "Why permanent...
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Change -- The Investor's Only Certainty
The markets have been going through a protracted and agonizing testing of the lows they reached in October 2008. On an intraday basis the S&P 500 today broke those lows and briefly touched the closing lows of the previous bear market reached on October 9, 2002: S&P 776.There are few investors alive today who have gone through markets as ugly...
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Some perspective during gut-wrenching markets
The stock market is going through a grim period, with market declines that have rivaled those of any bear market since World War II (see the chart of bear markets in this blog post, and click on the chart to enlarge).As the markets test the lows that they reached about a month ago, many investors are understandably dismayed. It seems there is little...
Monday, November 10, 2008
Gerry Frigon on Peninsula TV's "The Game"
Taylor Frigon Capital Management's President and Chief Investment Officer Gerry Frigon was recently asked to be a guest on the San Francisco Bay Area's Peninsula TV show "The Game." Here are three segments from that show.Part two:Part three:Video services courtesy of Gallagher Video, Paso Robles, CA.For later posts dealing with the same subject, see...
Monday, November 10, 2008
Your portfolio recovery plan
In our most recent posts, we have noted that the current bear market has revealed the deep problems in the existing structure of "wealth management" that we have long been aware of and warned about (long before we ever started a blog).We have noted articles appearing which give evidence of the damage that the "intermediary" system can give rise to,...
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
More evidence on the dangers of modern-day "wealth management"
In our previous post, we cited two recent articles giving evidence from the current bear market that backs up the core assertions we have made for years about the financial services industry -- specifically, that the idea of "wealth management" from an advisor who rotates his clients amongst varying investment strategies is not a sound model.We have...
Monday, November 03, 2008
The intermediary trap and the current bear market
October 2008 has come to a close, and it was one of the worst on record for the stock market.Even worse, however, is the fact that during volatile times such as these, many investors themselves experience more damaging rates of return due to poor decisions. A recent article on the Morningstar website reports that, according to Morningstar's Market...
