Investing

Last weekend, my wife and I returned to our former southeastern PA home town.  The occasion was a series of events with family and good friends, many former colleagues of mine.  On Friday night we had a happy reunion with a group that made up a wine making team, beginning in 2012, and continuing until Covid shut us down.  Most of the team is now retired, and much of the talk was about retirement, pensions, Medicare,

IN 2020, ELECTRIC car maker Lucid Motors brought in revenue of $4 million. Five years later, sales had risen impressively, to more than $1 billion. In 2025 alone, sales grew 68%. That sounds like a success story, and through that lens, it is. And yet, over that same period, the company’s stock dropped more than 89%.
What happened?
A better question is: What didn’t happen? Despite growing sales, the company has struggled to turn a profit.

The great football coach Vince Lombardi would often start each season by holding up a football in front of his team and saying, “Gentlemen, this is a football.” His point was simple but powerful: even the greatest players must return to the fundamentals if they want to succeed.
The same is true with investing. Whether you are a young person just starting out or someone who has been saving for decades, it helps to go back to the basics.

IT’S BEEN MORE than six years since Covid first entered our vocabulary. It goes without saying that investors have experienced a lot, and for better or worse, recent market events provide some useful lessons. The first has to do with the nature of the stock market.
What drives stock prices? Open a finance textbook, and the answer will be clear: The value of a stock should equal the sum of the company’s future profits.

I’m going to display my ignorance to a few of my most trusted friends…..
AGNC a REIT with a 4 yr history of 12-13% dividend payouts that currently pull out 98% of earnings, like most REITs.
Why doesn’t everyone flock to this stock?

RECENTLY, The Wall Street Journal ran a story about a new type of investment known as a digital stock token. For now, they aren’t available in the U.S., but they’re coming soon, so it’s worth taking a closer look.
What are stock tokens? At the most basic level, they’re a technology designed to make stock market investing quicker and easier than it is today. With tokens, trading won’t be limited to traditional business hours.

TAX EFFICIENT FUND placement is an often underrated topic. The goal of the tax efficient fund placement is to minimize taxes within your investments, and select the right account for those investments.

But how much does that actually matter?

Vanguard’s research finds that a thoughtful asset location strategy can add significantly more value than an equal location strategy. The value added typically ranges from 5 to 30 basis points of after-tax return, depending on circumstances (e.g.,

According to an article in the Toledo Blade (04/02), the Jones Leadership Academy of Business in Toledo is one of only two high schools in the country to have a simulated stock market lab. That is something that I feel the Toledo Public School district should be very proud of. The class is available to students during their junior and senior years. This is also the third year that the students have had a stock picking ‘challenge’.

Imagine an orchard where, every season, fruit is harvested and sold for income. How much is the orchard worth?
One owner might say that the orchard is worth so many dollars—what it could be sold for. But another owner might say that the orchard is worth so many dollars per year; that is, it’s worth is expressed in the income it generates, not in it’s current market value. Ownership of such income-producing assets is what allows wealthy families to remain wealthy over generations.

On February 28, 2026, “a war began when the United States and Israel launched surprise airstrikes on multiple sites and cities across Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and several other Iranian officials. Iran responded with missile and drone strikes against Israel, US bases, and US-allied countries in the Middle East” per Wikipedia.
Soon after, the Strait of Hormuz was closed to shipping, and by March 10, 2026, crude oil increased from $67 to $87 per barrel.

My portfolio is about as eventful as it gets right now — I’m on the verge of a threshold rebalance. My Vanguard Developed Asia Pacific fund is flirting with my 15% rebalance trigger, sitting at -14% as of Friday evening.
What makes this one interesting is that I’m sitting on an unusually large cash balance in my money market fund. Right now it’s actually my star performer — the only holding in the green. Bonds are a close second,

I noticed in the financial section of my local paper another story about a private credit fund restricting withdrawals. This time it’s an outfit called Apollo Global Management. Apparently investors tried to redeem around 12% of the fund’s capital base within a short period of time, and the fund responded by doubling down on its 5% quarterly cap. The result? Investors can’t access their own money.
This is the third story along the same lines I’ve read about recently,

HAVE YOU GIVEN any thought to what’s about to happen to your S&P 500 tracker?
Three enormous IPOs are expected later this year: SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Based on their most recent private transactions, SpaceX appears to be valued at around $1.25 trillion, OpenAI at roughly $800 billion, and Anthropic at approximately $380 billion. Combined, we could be looking at close to $3 trillion in private market value that wants to go public. To put that in perspective,

IN AN INTERVIEW a little while back, the technology investor Peter Thiel drew an uncomfortable comparison. Today’s frenzy around artificial intelligence, he said, parallels the tech stock bubble of the 1990s. To illustrate his point, Thiel pointed to Amazon.
By any measure, it’s been an extraordinary success. But, Thiel points out, it hasn’t been a straight line. At one point early on, Amazon shares lost more than 90% of their value.
“My suspicion is that that’s roughly where we are in AI.

I find it rather annoying to waste my time. Unfortunately, it seems I have to tag that handle onto my threshold rebalancing strategy over the last ten year period. A quick recap: I follow a once and done rebalance strategy anytime my equity holdings drift 15% from their normal allocation. The idea is to capture upside during a rebound.
After a recent post about my experience doing a rebalance during the April ’25 “liberation day” tariff announcement,