Nestled in between lip-sync dancers and fashion influencers, financial fraud lurks on TikTok. At least one person1 has noticed the risks to young consumers of social media: Since August 2020, @TikTokInvestors has been curating the most outrageous money-losing and dangerous videos culled from the “financial experts” at TikTok. The advice ranges from wrong to risky to criminal: -401ks? A scam! -Want to earn more money? Day trade at home! -Pay taxes? Not if you spend tax season on a boat! -Want to turn $100 into a million? Follow my strategy earning 2% a day! No, no, no and Hell, no! It is ..read more

    At The Money: Concentrated Portfolios:  Andrew Slimmon, Morgan Stanley (May 8, 2024) Are your expensive active mutual funds and ETFs actually active? Or, as is too often the case, are they only pretending to be active? Do they charge a high active fee but then behave more like an index fund? AndrewToday, we discuss the advantages of concentrated portfolios. If you want to own active funds, then make sure they differ its benchmarks and truly are active. Full transcript below. ~~~ About this week’s guest: Andrew Slimmon is Managing Director at Morgan Stanley Investment M ..read more

  It’s taken me months to organize all of my research for my next book project; it’s a lot of stuff, some dating back to 2000. Much of it reflects the bad ideas and numbers, and worse advice, that float around Wall Street. A lot of it has not aged well. But every now and then, something I saved turned out to be prescient — not because it was lucky, but because it contained a well-considered insight that has stood the test of time. Such was the case with a Justin Fox article “9% Forever?” in the December 26, 2005 edition of Fortune (their annual investors guide): “In May 1974, in the depth ..read more

Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures: • Is artificial intelligence the great filter that makes advanced technical civilisations rare in the universe? Through the lens of SETI, we reflect on humanity’s current technological trajectory – the modest projections for L suggested here, underscore the critical need to quickly establish regulatory frameworks for AI development on Earth and the advancement of a multiplanetary society to mitigate against such existential threats. The persistence of intelligent and conscious life in the universe cou ..read more

  She was previously president of Honey, where she orchestrated the company’s sale to PayPal Holdings Inc. for $4 billion. She has been named one of Ad Age’s 100 Most Influential Women in Advertising. She previously held executive leadership positions at Microsoft, Yahoo!, Pinterest, SoFi, Demand Media. BusinessWeek nd the San Francisco Chronicle. She discusses how pivoted from selling advertisement for print media to tech, growing Microsoft’s MSN to a multi-billion dollar business. Her network of corporate executive women in b0oth technology and finance is legendary. A list of his favori ..read more

    The Fed held its benchmark Federal-Funds rate steady yesterday at 5.25% – 5.5%, leaving the possibility of cuts in the future. Jerome Powell repeated his “Data Dependent” mantra. “Persuasive evidence” that higher interest rates were no longer necessary to bring down inflation is what the FOMC wants, and today I want to share a few pieces of that evidence. Our starting point is the shelter component of the Consumer Price Index. At about 40%, Shelter is the largest portion of the CPI. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) explains: “The data used as inputs in the construction of ..read more

    At the Money: Should you be a Stock Picker? (May 1, 2024) We know it’s challenging, but should you try your hand at stock picking? It’s fun, it gives you something to talk about at parties, but is it profitable? Today we look at the challenges of picking stocks. Only a few people have been successful at it over time, and those fund managers have become household names. Most of the rest have not earned their fund’s fees and costs. Full transcript below. ~~~ About this week’s guest: Larry Swedroe is Head of Financial and Economic Research at Buckingham Strategic Wealth. The fi ..read more

    Putting the final touches on my quarterly RWM client call, I wanted to share a chart that is surprising to many people. The above shows changes in the BLS Average Hourly Earnings and Consumer Price Index since the Pandemic blew up in February 2020. What seems to surprise people: On average, U.S. wages have outpaced inflation since 2020.1 What are the key drivers here? Two big things stand out: Fiscal Stimulus: At nearly $2 trillion, CARES Act I was the largest fiscal spend as a percentage of GDP (about 10%) since World War Two. CARES Act II was another $800 billion;  CARES ..read more

In the northeast, Spring has fully sprung. Temps are expected to kiss 80 today, and after a mild winter, we have been enjoying abundant sunshine. The daffodils and tulips are up, the magnolias are blooming, and the pear and cherry trees are explosions of colors! All of that blue sky beckons us to hop in a roadster to enjoy the open road. My first high HP car was a BMW convertible, but the open-top car that set the standard was the 507. BMW produced only 252 of these from 1956 to 1959. The plan was to export thousands per year to the United States, but it was too expensive to be a mass-market c ..read more

Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures: • The Man Who Killed Google Search: When Raghavan joined the company, Yahoo held a 30.4% market share — not far from Google’s 36.9%, and miles ahead of the 15.7% of MSN Search. By May 2012, Yahoo was down to just 13.4% and had shrunk for the previous nine consecutive months, and was being beaten even by the newly-released Bing. That same year, Yahoo had the largest layoffs in its corporate history, shedding nearly 2,000 employees — or 14% of its overall workforce.  Under Raghavan, Google has beco ..read more