Markets

Now we’ve all had a little reminder over the last few weeks of what it feels like when Mr Market smacks us in the face with a loss, I think it’s an excellent time for everyone to assess how they truly feel about their losses. Are you indifferent? Maybe it’s made you slightly stressed, a bit edgy about the future? Or are you constantly checking your account and wishing you had done something before the losses piled up?

I just looked at my investments for the last month. It’s not a pretty picture and I have a big chunk in bonds and cash. 
Have we entered a period of concern? Are assumptions under stress? Do we do anything or nothing? Should short-term spending be adjusted? 
For those who are relying on investments in retirement what are your thoughts – just an anticipated blip or something more?

IN APRIL 2005, art dealers Robert Simon and Alex Parish traveled to New Orleans to attend an auction. They were particularly interested in a work titled Salvator Mundi. The painting was in bad shape, having been neglected for years. But Simon and Parish ended up bidding on it and taking it home for $10,000.
After some restoration work, the pair succeeded in having it authenticated as a work of Leonardo da Vinci.

LAST WEEK, OPENAI founder Sam Altman sat down for an interview with venture capitalist Brad Gerstner and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Both are investors in OpenAI, so it seemed like a friendly audience. But Gerstner posed a question that seemed to make Altman uncomfortable.
Since introducing ChatGPT three years ago, OpenAI has posted impressive growth, but Gerstner wondered whether the company was, nonetheless, getting ahead of itself.
“How can a company with $13 billion in revenues make $1.4 trillion of spend commitments?” Gerstner asked.

By William Housley and my thinking partner AI (GPT-5)
A Changing Market Mood
William: It seems like the market is running on excitement. The big AI stocks are still climbing, and anyone who hesitates feels like they’re missing the boat. When everything moves that fast, can a contrarian approach really work anymore?
AI: That’s a question investors have wrestled with for centuries — what happens when momentum becomes the market itself?

SOME NEWS STORIES are unusual in ways that it’s hard to know what to make of them. Such is the case with the recent collapse of a relatively unknown company called First Brands.
On the surface, it might seem like a mundane story. First Brands is an auto parts supplier, making commodity items like brake pads and windshield wipers. The company was founded in 2013 by a fellow named Patrick James, who built it up over the years by acquiring several other,

There are concepts in our lives that trouble me.  One of them is our inability to really establish a price (value) for anything.  I am already getting a headache writing about this.  We have arrived at a time when the price of many things has become dynamic.  And, I am not thinking about inflation now, although that increases the challenge.  From movie tickets to airline seats, the price of a head of lettuce, the cost of one share of VTI,

STOCK MARKET INVESTORS are enjoying yet another strong year. The S&P 500 has gained about 14% so far, shrugging off, for the most part, uncertainty over tariffs, interest rates and the latest government shutdown.
Should this worry us?
Since ancient times, soothsayers have been attempting—without luck—to forecast the future. As it relates to investment markets, the frustrating reality is that no one knows what the future will bring. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do.

Being a human being and a long term investor is ….. challenging.
I think we all probably know the accepted wisdom. Timing the market is almost impossible. Trading is a fool’s errand. Long term investing is the only way to reliably build wealth. The key is to determine your plan, set your allocations then stick to it.
But because we, as the HD community, take an interest in personal finance, we are also likely exposed to financial media.

Have you been getting that familiar tingling sensation lately? The one that says “you’ve seen this all before.” Watching AI stocks soar, then keep on going, I can’t help but think back to the year 2000. I genuinely knew a guy back then who quit his job to day-trade dot-com stocks from his house. He now works in insurance. There’s a lesson in there somewhere I guess.
Comparisons to the dot-com bust are rife. I may be a slightly thick Irish guy,

The proposition of an article I recently read was “this is the dumbest stock market in history.” Why is it dumb? In part because of an increasingly popular approach to investing—one that most in the HumbleDollar community, including myself, subscribe to.  According to the article, passive index investing is “the very definition of dumb money, because indexers buy stocks without any regard to valuation.” Here are some other points that caught my attention in the article,

BARRY RITHOLTZ’S NEW BOOK, How Not to Invest, offers investors a cautionary tale—many of them, in fact.
Ritholtz has been in and around the investment industry for more than 30 years—as a trader, a journalist and, most recently, as cofounder of a wealth management firm. 
In short, he is no stranger to Wall Street. His conclusion? It can be a minefield.
Bad actors like Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff are well known.

LARRY ELLISON, THE 81-YEAR-OLD cofounder of Oracle Corporation, recently became the world’s wealthiest person.
Oracle, a software company, isn’t nearly as large as its peers. So how did Ellison’s net worth manage to surpass that of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and the founders of other much larger companies?
The answer is simple: In the nearly 50 years since Oracle’s founding, Ellison has almost never sold a share of his company’s stock. According to an analysis by Smart Insider,

I own Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS), a small amount of I Bonds and my wife and I are both receiving social security benefits  so I have a lot of interest in what the federal government will do as far publishing the appropriate indexes that determines the upcoming inflation adjustment for TIPS, I Bonds and our social security benefit given the 10/01/2025 shutdown.
Looking around on the internet I came across this 10/15/2013 Boglehead’s article.
In the article there is a link to the federal register on the topic which Appendix C,

Each year in Seattle, our exquisite summer weather exits stage left in September, pursued by a bear worthy of Shakespeare: pervasive gloomy clouds and steady rain persist until next July. More rain accumulates in other cities, but we have more gray, cloudy days (usually 226/year).
Those many days of non-stop summer sunshine lead even the most careful to grow forgetful, leaving home without a rain shell, driving with joyous abandon on newly slick and dark roads.