Recently, CNBC ran a short interview segment entitled "Battle of the Bugs," comparing the fanaticism of some Apple investors and some gold investors (or "gold bugs").*While the network and interviewer chose to focus on the similar intensity of both camps, and jokingly tried to portray each group as a sort of "cult," we feel that the interview completely...
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Why all investors should be Giants fans!
The Major League Baseball League Championship Series are going on this week in both the National League and the American League, and it occurs to us that there is an investment lesson (probably several investment lessons) in the various matchups taking place.One of the most striking contrasts to us as portfolio managers is the difference between the...
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Freedom and the rescue of the Chilean miners
The ongoing rescue of the miners in Chile may well go down in history as one of the most amazing events of our time.Here in a short video clip (above), two members of the Wall Street Journal's Editorial Page, Deputy Editor Daniel Heninnger and "The Americas" columnist Mary Anastasia O'Grady, explain some very important lessons from this moving rescue.They...
Monday, October 11, 2010
Rip Van Winkle, 2010
A little over a year ago, we published a post entitled "If Rip Van Winkle took a one-year nap before September 15, 2008." The purpose of the post, as we explained at the end, was not to encourage the kind of negligent attitude that Washington Irving ascribed to the protagonist of his famous short story (a character of "insuperable aversion to all...
Tuesday, October 05, 2010
Comparisons between cloud computing and the dot-com bubble
We have written previously about the continuity between the dot-com crash of 2000-2002 and the financial panic of 2008-2009, and the belief that "The new economy of the late 1990s was an invention of media and Wall Street [. . .]. By 2000, new economy rhetoric became a frenzy of half-truths, bad history, and wishful thinking" -- a belief that the...
