Several years ago I had a checking account that paid 4% interest on the money I had in that account. To get that rate, I had to jump through several hoops including setting up direct deposit of funds into that account, completing 10 debit card transactions each month, etc. The interesting thing with this 4% rate was that it matches the 4% withdrawal rate financial advisors often recommend to clients ...

When Adobe (ADBE) announced the $20 billion acquisition of Figma last week, investors were wildly disappointed. That disappointment cost Adobe $35 billion in market cap including the $1.6 billion that Adobe shed today. We mostly focus on the acquisition of public companies and merger arbitrage spreads on those deals, but this deal was fascinating on multiple fronts. Most investors were wondering what exactly Figma was and why Adobe would pay ...

In fiscal 2021 ended June 30, 2021, Yale’s massive endowment generated $12.1 billion in investment gains. The size of these gains was only trumped by the fact that this represented a 40.2% return net of fees.  Clearly Yale University was positioned well to benefit from the stimulus fueled pandemic bubble of 2020-2021. In a big loss to the investment community, less than two months before the end of Yale’s fiscal ...

In our last article discussing the huge impact of inflation on your retirement plan I wrote, When playing with the inputs that go into our What’s Your Number tool, I was struck by just how big of an impact two of those inputs had on the results. Just a small change could switch the eventual outcome from leaving millions of dollars for your heirs/charity to being without money in the later years ...

Inflation is a hidden tax that impacts everyone and especially the less fortunate among us. Unless you own your home, drive an electric car, don’t eat out much and grow your own food, the recent big spike in inflation likely impacted you. The 20 year CPI chart below shows the unusual nature of the current inflationary period. Last week in our What’s Your Number article, we discussed how figuring out the ...

Is $2 million enough money for a comfortable retirement? The answer to this simple question is as unique and varied as each of us and our complex lives. Over the years I have had several conversations with friends about the money they think they need for retirement and the number they come up with often surprises me. The number is often overstated and the more assets they appear to already ...

While having coffee with a fellow investor in downtown Mountain View last week, we got to discussing our investment process and it was interesting that while both of us preferred event-driven strategies like merger arbitrage, the process could best be described as opportunistic without being siloed into a specific style. I discussed this approach in an article titled A Season For Every Strategy a few weeks ago. A lot of ...

The rapid decline we saw in U.S. markets over the last two weeks left a lot of investors wondering if we have bottomed yet. With the Nasdaq and the S&P 500 both down almost 9% during the last month, the damage has been widespread and is no longer limited to just SaaS or technology stocks. There have been a lot of comparisons to other bear markets to determine if there ...

After an intra-day dip into bear market territory in May, the S&P 500 finally entered a bear market earlier this month. We saw some moderation of fear today but as you can see from the Fear and Greed Index below, we are still in extreme fear territory. As I write this, the S&P 500 is down 8.8% for the month, while our model portfolio has given back 3.5% of its ...

I was in a checkout line at Safeway last week and the person checking out ahead of me was rather taken aback by her grocery bill. She indicated that she did not understand inflation and was not sure if prices will ever come down. This consumer was not the only one surprised. The 8.6% increase in the consumer price index for May 2022 was a big surprise for most economists and ...