Archive for the ‘Investment’ Category
Best Links of the Week
Great fake travel posters made by artist Ali Xenos. There are some great ones of Rivendell, Tatooine, Dagobah, and Winterfell.
Kevin DeYoung on the New-Calvinism
‘Gravity’ Spinoff: Watch the Other Side of Sandra Bullock’s Distress Call – Jonas Cuaron’s seven-minute companion short, filmed in Greenland and featuring Bullock’s voice
Brutal personal piece on about one young man’s battle with our present culture of death – “I Lost My Daughter to the Culture of Death”
Modalimy – Co-parenting for those that want children but not a relationship or marriage. You really cannot make this stuff up.
“Nelson Mandela: A Candid Assessment” – from Catholic site Crisis Magazine
Interesting piece from personal finance blog Mr. Money Mustache entitled, “Get Rich With: The Position of Strength.” Makes some salient points.
Woofmaker.com – just click on it, especially if you are a Home Alone fan.
Interesting piece in the Atlantic dealing with Clickbait and UpWorthy’s game changing headlines
Best Links of the Week
Russell Moore has an interesting piece on the parallels between what Romance Novels do for women and what Pornography does for men.
Here is a nice rebuttal of Harold Camping and the whole world ending on 5/21/2011. Also a man spent his life savings putting up those billboards everywhere. This highlights the need for doing theology in community. Doing theology on islands doesn’t turn out well. Also, the ministry has an estimated worth of $72 million, although this may be a bit misleading as the lionshare of this is in FCC licenses.
Reportedly on 60 Minutes this evening, George Hincapie weighs in on Lance Armstrong and the use of PEDs. This is interesting because unlike Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton, Hincapie actually has credibility and is probably the cyclist closest to Armstrong. Would be pretty sad if true.
Ray Lewis says one unintended consequence of the NFL Lockout will be a rise in crime. I think I am actually inclined to agree with Lewis and am wondering if he read Freakonomics recently.
N.T. Wright weighs in on Stephen Hawking’s comments about heaven
Tim Challies annual, “Where & Why We Buy Books”
Medvedev warns of new Cold War over missile defense shield
Egyptian Saif al-Adel now acting leader of al Qaeda
Iran reportedly building rocket bases in Venezuala
Dark Tower trilogy of movies and two tv series may be nixed. For those who don’t know this is some of Stephen King’s best work and was a very seminal body of work for the television show LOST.
San Francisco man reportedly “cured” of AIDS
Several Hedge Fund managers buying up massive amounts of farmland
Some Wikileaks documents of Gitmo files shed light on enhanced interrogation techniques and unintentionally bolster their effectiveness
Shallow Small Groups:
Really well produced and themed time lapse:
Best Links of the Week
The Economist has an excellent article entitled “The Disposable Academic: Why Doing a PhD is a Waste of Time”
Delightfully lengthy article in GQ about Mossad’s somewhat botched assassination of a Hamas leader in the city of Dubai. (HT: Phill)
Fascinating article that makes a compelling case that the Stuxnet worm that has disrupted Iran’s nuclear program originated ironically from China (and not the U.S., Britain, or Israel).
50 cent makes $8,700,000.00 off one tweet. As a corollary to this article, there is way more money in self-branding in the entertainment industry than there is in the entertainment industry. I also think it is ridiculous where people will take investment advice from.
I watched Ted Haggard’s little special on TLC last weekend. I won’t delve into analyzing the state of his soul but Carl Trueman does a pretty decent job.
When you hang your head in shame, the last thing you should be thinking about is whether the camera has caught your good side.
“The Lazy Slander of the Pro-Life Cause”
BBC article on the impact of the King James Bible on the English language.
No other book, or indeed any piece of culture, seems to have influenced the English language as much as the King James Bible. Its turns of phrase have permeated the everyday language of English speakers, whether or not they’ve ever opened a copy.
2010 Los Angeles County bill tab for illegal immigrants in public schools was $600,000,000.00.
Utterly appalling story of abortion doctor in Philadelphia. There had been no inspection of the clinic since 1993.
Gosnell “induced labor, forced the live birth of viable babies in the sixth, seventh, eighth month of pregnancy and then killed those babies by cutting into the back of the neck with scissors and severing their spinal cord,” Williams said.
Patients were subjected to squalid and barbaric conditions at Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society, where Gosnell performed dozens of abortions a day, prosecutors said. He mostly worked overnight hours after his untrained staff administered drugs to induce labor during the day, they said.
Best Links of the Week
NYT infographic on reducing our nations inflated bugdet. While we are on the subject here are two proposals that inspired the aforementioned infographic: Fiscal Commission’s Co-Chair Proposal and Illustrative Savings.
There is a fairly large controversy brewing over both the TSAs use of full-body scanners and their substantially more aggressive pat-downs. I have actually had one of the full-body scans before and poked my head around to see the image (much to the dislike of TSA) and it was pretty invasive. A man in California got a tape of his encounter with TSA after refusing the scan and getting the new ‘special’ patdown. He gets arrested and faces substantial fines for warning the TSA employee not to “touch his junk.”
Doug Wilson has a nice piece entitled, “Populism and Common Sense.”
Besides the fact I think morality and atheism are completely incompatible, I like Christopher Hitchens. Andrew Anthony has a very well-written piece on his current thoughts during his battle with stage-iv cancer.
“Most Common Causes of Death in the United States”
NY Post has an article on Hookers for Jesus, a ministry seeking to get sex-workers off the streets of Las Vegas. An interesting read.
Facebook jumping into the email forray. I wonder if this will end up being part of the ever-expanding wedge between younger and older web-users where younger generations employ Facebook over email to communicate. Maybe I am a bit out of touch but I fail to see this being very successful for Facebook for anyone older than 22. Their current message platform is horrendous to work with and often crashes after you have composed substantial portions of text – so much so that before I hit “send” I always copy all of my composed text because I have lost it so many time.
Comical video which attempts to explain quantitative easing. I should note there is some misinformation in the video. The Fed regularly buys/sells assets to change the amount of base money. However, in this case the amount is specified ($600,000,000,000.00) rather than dealing with overnight interest rates. Given there are rather alarmingly high amounts of ties between Goldman Sachs and the Fed as well as Goldman Sachs and the Obama administration, it would be an alarming precedent for the Fed to buy its own treasuries from itself.
App of the week: Google Voice by Google – after months of dragging its feet, apple finally let this app hit the iTunes store.
Ken Block, Ford Fiesta, Awesome:
Best Links of the Week
The Economist has a brief piece on the New Calvinism. Not the best piece of journalism I’ve seen from The Economist but intriguing that they would even think it was newsworthy.
Owner of Segway dies driving Segway off cliff in accident.
Apparently, an SEC report says that the “flash crash” of 5/6/10 was the result of trading software gone awry.
Some pretty incredible wallpaper from Alpinist.
Taliban beware, U.S. to have self-aiming sniper rifles next year. I have got to say this is some pretty cool technology, I just hope it stays in the right hands.
Fascinating story of a guy who has lived for three years exclusively on paid medical studies.
Best Links of the Week
Joel Osteen or a Fortune Cookie?
Article on pay scales for different undergraduate degrees entitled: Momma’s Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Religious Study Majors… I guess my mom didn’t read that one.
Disturbing article from WIRED on Facebook’s out of control privacy policies.
Episcopal Church in Massachusetts creates worship service for dogs. Service includes Eucharist for the pets. Just when I think I have heard it all, something like this comes out of left field. Fail.
TSA employee beats up and threatens to kill other TSA employee over comments regarding his full-body scan.
Tony Reinke takes a stab at answering the question, “Does God Delight in Non-Christian Art?” (HT: JT)
The Washington Times and Bloomberg have some helpful articles explaining derivatives as an investment product and outlining some of their dangers.
Large pyschologist study shows that babies know difference from good and evil at 6 months old. I might add that they don’t need to be taught how to sin either.
If you like statistics and books, Tim Challies has a great analysis of the book-buying habits of the readers of his website.
Excellent Article from Tim Keller on Issues Facing the Western Church
The Big Issues Facing the Western Church
1. The opportunity for extensive culture-making in the U.S
2. The rise of Islam
3. The new non-western Global Christianity
4. The growing cultural remoteness of the gospel
5. The end of prosperity?
As usual, Keller has some prescient and keen cultural insight. Your thoughts?
Thoughts on Economics and Investment, Part 3: Diversification
Portfolio Diversification: A Sound Strategy?
If there were a Ten Commandments of investing, “Thou shalt diversify,” would certainly make the list. This post will explore the veracity of portfolio diversification.
Relevance of the lessons learned from ‘buy and hold’
In the previous post in this series, we challenged another member of the Decalogue, “Thou shalt buy and hold.” We concluded that the ‘buy and hold’ strategy is highly problematic in the 21st century. “Buy and hold” is only a self-fulfilling economic prophecy if the 21st century has the same economic growth that the 20th had, including all of its landmark innovations. Energy and food are no longer cheap. Science is bumping up against technological asymptotes. Further, it should be noted that no institutional investment firm follows the ‘buy and hold’ advice. I believe this advice is intended to bring more (predictable) money into the markets for those who manipulate the markets (institutional investors, hedge funds, big box financials…).
Why Portfolio Diversification Exists
Portfolio diversification is essentially hedging your financial bets. In theory, hedging your bets seems like a good idea: spreading out risk by holding positions that perform well when other positions you also hold perform poorly. I think financial advisors give this kind of advice for three reasons: 1. Market unpredictability – financial advisors do not want to stick their head out, be wrong, and have clients upset with them 2. Risk minimization – it is much safer to have your investors have vanilla portfolios that post minimal gains/losses, plus, some people actually embrace minimal risk (esp. those retired or nearing retirement) 3. To make the market more predictable – big box financial firms want you buying their financial product, such that, their financial product can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, and they also want your money in the market to be a stabilizing influence (ie. if half the market are Joe Plumber with diversified portfolio, then it makes Big Box Financial’s or Richard Hedge Funds market manipulation simpler).
The Danger of Portfolio Diversification
Portfolio diversification can be akin to putting ice in your already cold Coca-Cola. You trade a drop of a few degrees in liquid temperature to the watering down of the beverage. Portfolio diversification has the same affect (and I have a deep disdain for watered down Coke). One has to ask themselves:
If I know (or am quite confident) some particular aspect of my (diversified) portfolio is going to perform poorly this year (or insert X period of time here), why would I continue to hold the position?
Consider the following, several long held safe bets will likely perform poorly this year:
-Bonds – with interest rates so low, these will perform poorly until the global economy bounces back and interest rates rise
-Small-cap stocks – stocks that have no international aspect and are domestically focused will incur the brunt of the American financial climate without the benefit of the pockets of international growth.
-S+P 500 – some may disagree with me here, but I think the S+P is overvalued already. David Tice at Federated Investors thinks is overvalued by 40%.
Our current administration has been pursuing hardcore inflationary policies by artificially flushing massive amounts of printed money (borrowed from the Chinese) into the economy. These are inflationary policies, and given time they will result in inflation (it is just a matter of how much inflation). Why would I want any exposure in my portfolio to these aforementioned investments given the financial trajectory of the U.S. and world economies.
The two dangers of portfolio diversification are:
1. You will always have aspects of your portfolio performing poorly if you are truly diversified
2. Diversification assumes a long-term strategy (ie. the ‘buy and hold’ strategy) that is highly problematic
Up next we will take a look at the short-term investment strategy.
Modern Pensées 