With the 2024 election drawing closer, many people are dialing in to their fears and hopes.  For investors, now is a good time to step…

As the presidential election cycle wears on (ugh), dramatic and startling storylines are attracting much attention.  To name a few: recent convictions of the former…

Prudence in Both Bad Times, and GoodDon’t be an emotional investor.  Overall portfolio performance is impacted by many things:  how much is invested in stocks…

Taking Stock of 2023 and Looking to the Year Ahead2023 turned out to be a positive year for stocks.  This came as something of a…

These Past Three Years… Many of the worst market events in history have occurred in September and October.  Ominous, right?  Is the potential/averted/potential government shutdown…

Introduction Okay, so the debt default crisis didn’t happen.  Was that a near miss, or was it never actually in doubt?  The whole situation was framed…

Originally disseminated in May, 2023  Introduction The Deficit.  The debt ceiling.  Spending cuts.  Default.  The news out of Washington has been on a slow boil of…

Ugh, so how bad is this?Animal spirits is the term John Maynard Keynes used to describe stock market buyers and sellers.  This certainly seems apt…

Intro: Context Always MattersWith the fearful headlines of the day, it’s important to consider the context.  We are experiencing aftershocks from an event unprecedented in…

March, 2022 Introduction: Grim Times Need Context. And now we add conventional land war in Europe to the list of impossibilities of the past few…

Let’s Remember the ContextThis can help us follow trends that may take many years, even decades to play out.  Without context, we can often become…

As an investor, I remain cautiously optimistic about the long-term prospects for stocks, though in the next few years we could see moderate overall returns…

   Cryptocurrency: What’s it all about?  Introduction Cryptocurrencies. This topic receives a great deal of attention nowadays and has left many people, including myself, with…

Introduction – What the Heck am I Talking About?In spite of some ominous current headlines, I remain cautiously optimistic with perhaps a short-term tilt towards…

We have come a long way since this time last year. Anecdotally, there are many signs of recovery. But at the same time, there are…

I’ve rewritten this essay three times now since the beginning of January.  I started out hoping to write something cogent about all that we’d been…

In Rhode Island where I live, we are in the midst of a two-week “pause” which is something just a bit less restrictive than the…

Riots, pandemic, destruction. Disastrous levels of unemployment. Awful GDP numbers. And yet the market rallies. This seems discordant, to say the least. It can be…

The news that oil prices turned negative is surprising and concerning, to say the least. Here are some thoughts about this situation and where it…

First quarter of 2020 has just ended and almost no superlative seems too great to describe these past months. So much happened at such a…

As this coronavirus crisis has progressed, the tenor of the news has progressed too – in many cases taking on an ominous tone. These are…