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As we prepare to settle into the holidays -- to commune with family and friends, and to remember what life is really about -- it's time to put this terrible year behind us....keep reading

As this newsletter is written, during the week before Christmas, it's clear that 2000 will see the first calendar year stock market decline since 1990 - and that's just for the broad market indexes. Nasdaq, which attracted the huge preponderance of all net equity inflows in recent years, has been the scene of one of the great bear markets of all time....keep reading

I've mentioned more than once, since the turn of the year, what a delight it is that this newsletter's subscriber rolls are at an all-time high. Of late, however, I've come to wonder if a concomitant number of people are actually reading it....keep reading

Buffett, Tweedy Browne Company, Michael Santoli...keep reading

The great secular bull market in bonds--which began gloriously thirty years ago when Paul Volcker, with the steadfast backing of Ronald Reagan, broke the back of inflation--has ended ignominiously with Ben Bernanke launching QE2, even as price signals from gold, oil, commodities and the dollar have clearly heralded the onset of reflation, if not inflation....keep reading

Q: I'm an agent of a major, brand-name insurance company, and have built a ...
A:I'd just stick to the truth, which is (as I see it): (a) your great company has ...

Q:I was particularly struck by your answer to a subscriber in the September
A:I'd start with four books which are not, strictly speaking, histories, but if your ...

Q: In the last issue, you differentiated between financial events/crises and ...
A: I wish there were some clear signal or signals by which you can always tell, ...

Q: Do you have a philosophy of mortgages: paying them down (or off ...
A: The fact that you don't even mention the interest rate -- enabling me to make a ...

Q: Got a new client with 80% of his invested net worth in eleven blue chip stocks ...
A: Tired, indeed. This portfolio looks like it fell off the back of a bank trust ...

Q: Do you know of a book that addresses the issue of equities vs. real estate? I ...
A: There is no book; there is no is...keep reading

1. Granted, it goes back to April, but an article in InvestmentNews by Jeff Benjamin....
2. Fidelity published on July 26 a superb addition to its Fidelity Viewpoints series titled...
3. The peerless John Steele Gordon, who literally wrote the book (Hamilton's Blessing) on the national debt,...
4. Also from the WSJ is a September 10 piece by E.S. Browning...
5. It has been a constant theme of this resource that since the economy troughed in the first half...

April 2005 PDF Newsletter...keep reading

(On May 8, Bear Stearns' chief global economist, the great David Malpass, offered the firm's clients a characteristically epigrammatic overview of the state of the world economy. It is reprinted here, virtually in its entirety.)...keep reading

(An earlier version of this essay was e-mailed to subscribers in mid-September, for transmission to your clients as you saw fit. Like all other "Client's Corner" essays, it is available to be distributed by subscribers only, without specific permission or acknowledgment. It remains, however, copyrighted material; you may reprint but certainly not edit it.)...keep reading

March 2005 PDF Newsletter...keep reading

Cash and Short-Term Assets Versus Money Market Assets......keep reading

Q: I know I must be looking right past it, but I can't find a dramatic statistic that I ...
A: You have it exactly right, but for the record, it was referenced just in passing in ...

Q: I'm in the process of really organizing and streamlining my business. One of ...
A: To the second question: no indeed, because I think you're making a serious ...

Q: My hunch is that the latest activity of mutual fund and separate account ...
A: You know my thoughts. Calling market timing "tactical asset allocation" is like ...

Q: I've been trying to articulate a thought to use with new clients who come to me...
A:.First, your repeating not once but twice the utterly irrelevant and meaningless ...

...keep reading

Q: I have a great, long-term client -- heaps of trust, going back to 1998, always ...
A: I wouldn't advise someone "like this" about accepting the offer on the house ...

Q: I fired a client last week; no question there. The issue is what to say to/do with ...
A: Act as if nothing happened. If (and only if) asked by a relative what happened, ...

Q: How do I respond to a legitimate prospect who asked, because someone ...
A: Your first and second answers are two of the three correct ones. (1) You have ...

Q: I'm a subscriber, so I avoid focusing on performance numbers, but I have a ...
A: I'm dead set against quarterly "performance" reports no matter how snazzy ......keep reading

Q:Together with an enrolled agent and an estate attorney, I'm planning monthly ...
A:I would never care who I prospected, would never try to tailor my message to ...

Q:I just placed a follow-up phone call to a prospect. She did not want to move
A:Under no circumstances are you ever to contact this person again. If she ...

Q:Is there a general rule for the use of variable annuities' income/withdrawal ...
A:I don't think there are any hard and fast rules on this, because the tradeoffs ...

Q:I just had a "this time it's different" conversation with a fellow advisor and was ...
A:Who ever said that equities would continue to afford the "same rate of ......keep reading

You rarely get a learning experience like the one the global economy, and the capital markets which reflect that economy, put on over the last thirty months or so. On those exquisitely infrequent occasions when you do, you want to try to make sure you learn everything you can from it....keep reading

Nick Murray, Derek Sivers...keep reading

I'm looking at a particularly dramatic and effective illustration on the cover of Time magazine. It shows what must be trillions of dollar bills being sucked down into a huge hole in the space/time continuum, as the headline screams, "That Monster Deficit: America's Economic Black Hole."...keep reading

Let me first confess my biases. (A) I'm a natural-born, believing and practicing contrarian, as the accompanying article about technology makes clear....keep reading

All his life, George Washington was fond of quoting a line from Joseph Addison's play Cato to the effect that we cannot insure success but we can deserve it....keep reading