INSIGHTS Blog

When I was 16, my mother helped me get an afterschool job loading trucks at a factory in Philadelphia. I learned a lot about how the world works during the two years I worked there. As a part-time dock loader, I was low man on the totem pole. I'm certain I was also the lowest paid. But it was enough to take my girlfriend on dates and have a little extra money of my own. The owner of the factory was a relatively young man of roughly 40. He was rarely around the plant.

I think of myself as a boy of summer. When I was young, summer was a time to spend outside with my friends. We played a form of baseball with only two kids using a plastic bat and ball. We played tag and touch football, and really any game we could think of or make up. It was truly great fun. So much so that more than five decades later, you can still find me outside playing games in the summer. Most of the time that we played, someone won and someone else lost.

Here we are, almost halfway through yet another historic year.  Unlike the turbulent times of 2020 and 2021 though, the markets this year have not been as kind.  Inflation, war, and recession are just a few of the things weighing on the minds of investors as we look to the rest of 2022 and beyond. 

There is always a list. The items on the list change quite regularly. The purpose of the list does not. It's list of things to worry about. We all have a list. Some of the items on the list are particular to our own personal situation whether it's our age, our personal finances, our job, etc. That's an important list, but the list I'm referring to isn't that one. The list I'm talking about is the list we all share.

Some events are truly world changing. I don’t know if we can ever be sure that an event will be world changing until quite some time after it happened, and we can see the effect. My hyperbolic title can be argued with because I’m not going to discuss the inventions of fire or the wheel.

The old adage is to buy low and sell high. This is, of course, what everyone wants to do. If you sell anything for more than you paid for it, then you make money. Simple. But simple is not always easy. In the case of investments, it can sometimes be brutally difficult.

Time for one of my very favorite quotes – “Prediction is very difficult, especially when it pertains to the future.” The great dilemma of investing is that we make an investment in the present with the hope of making a profit in the future. But we can’t predict the future.

Markets hate uncertainty. Uncertainty breeds volatility. And, as we have experienced with the S&P 500 down over 10% year-to-date, the volatility has accelerated as the Ukraine-Russia conflict unfolds. Well, Russia has now invaded Ukraine. That much is certain. The new uncertainty is to what end.

Driving from Eastern Iowa to Denver is a very long, flat excursion that starts out at about 700 feet above sea level and ends up at 5,000 feet. The rise is so gradual as to be unnoticeable. If the U.S. economy conforms to my outlook, its rise should be pretty much like that long, flat drive that somehow ends up substantially higher than where it started.

Back in the 2010s, our son married a beautiful Chinese woman named Yi Feng. We held a big celebration in Baltimore, because that’s where the oldest member of our family lived. Warren Ballard was 100 years old at that time. Yi’s parents flew in from China. After the very nice celebration and breakfast the next day, the six of us—Aaron and Yi, Yi’s parents, and Joan and I—drove to Fairfield in two cars.

Last December, in 2020, Joan and I boldly ventured where we had not gone since the beginning of the pandemic: we took a road trip that involved staying in hotels. On our first night at a hotel in Tennessee, we encountered a new world. At the front desk, we requested a room that no one had been in for the past three or four days. With so few people traveling, this was an easy request for them to fill.

Forty-one years ago, I was a young newlywed, having just married my first wife, Joan (inside joke, she’s still my wife!), the year before.Joan was an account executive at Wisconsin Telephone. A local furniture store was expanding and she excitedly took me to meet their CEO, Lenny Mattioli.I rarely watched TV, so I wasn’t very aware of Crazy TV Lenny. But I was impressed when we sat down in his new 300,000-square-foot showroom, across the parking lot from their old 100,000-square-foot

After doing a quick Google search, I found this commonly used definition of a stock: ownership share in a company. Others have described stock as a way to have part ownership of a business that someone else manages for you. But do these definitions tell the full story?

Delta is sweeping the world, and unless you've been out of the loop for months, you already know quite a bit about it. Covid-19 is changing so fast that by the time you read this, there may already be new variants.

If you're reading this, I'm guessing you're not the type to be bored by finance and economics, so here goes the thrilling story of the business cycle. To see the business cycle in action, we need to go back to the years 2005 to 2007. In case you've forgotten, that was the period of house mania and liar's loans.