It has been one heck of a ride in US stocks since the "Covid Crash" lows. The S&P 500 index* is up just shy of 100% since March 23rd 2020. In 2021, the S&P 500 continues to rise and has yet to sell off more than 5% at any point - offering a very smooth …
Category: FINANCE
The Only Winning Move
Have you ever seen the movie War Games (1983)? The film, which stars Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, John Wood, and Ally Sheedy, follows David Lightman (Broderick), a young hacker who unwittingly accesses a United States military supercomputer programmed to predict and execute nuclear war against the Soviet Union*. At the end of the movie (spoiler alert!), the supercomputer realizes that the many different scenarios (games) involving …
The Inflation Boogeyman
Inflation is on the minds of investors as February 2021 comes to a close. As you can see in the chart below, inflation expectations have risen sharply from the COVID lows to the highest level since 2013*. Of course, this is "expected" inflation over the next five years and not actual inflation which is currently …
Three Key Investing Charts For 2021
As the 2021 investing year gets going, I thought I would post a few charts* that I think are important for investors this year. The first chart is a one year chart of the relative performance of the S&P 500 when compared to non-US stocks. We can see that US stocks have significantly outperformed non-US …
The Optimism Bias
I am currently reading a book titled "The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain" by Tali Sharot (see below for Amazon link). The Optimism Bias is simply: "our tendency as humans to overestimate the probability of positive events and underestimate the probability of negative events". The author believes that the human brain …
The Naperville Financial Planner 