Rob McCreary

Connected To Home As Thanksgiving approaches I notice excitement and enthusiasm everywhere for returning home. In Robert Frost’s poem, “Death of the Hired Man”, Silas, an itinerant handyman, comes home to die at Warren and Mary’s farm. Even though they are not family and he has a rich brother, home for Silas is where he is […]

The Congressional Budget Office usually does a good job of predicting the financial future for our country. Its 2017 Report looks out over the next 10 years and predicts many trends that we all know: Budget deficits will grow and accelerate Interest rates on government debt will rise to almost 4% in 2027 Government debt

Margin of Safety I admire Seth Klarman for his investment discipline and his realistic view of business models and securities analysis. As I have written before, his book “Margin of Safety-Risk Adverse Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor” is out of print but can be purchased online for slightly more than $2000. I have read it

I am amazed at the number of highly profitable business models focused on monetizing individual identity, location and movement, credit, socialization, and dating. The internet has allowed many companies to leverage you for their gain and profit. But one of them stands out as extraordinary. The three Credit Reporting Agencies. (Experian, Equifax and TransUnion), have

The most important ingredient of success in private equity is not capital.  It is people. After 40 years of working in mergers and acquisitions as a lawyer, investment banker and private equity owner I come back to people as the biggest variable in my success and failures. Why is it so hard to find good

Freakonomics has really interesting podcasts, and the last one of a three part series on August 20, entitled “Bad Medicine” did not disappoint.   The long standing view of the big three causes of death was Heart, Cancer and Respiratory.  According to The Center For Disease Control, here is the list for 2014 sorted by the number

When Luca Pacioli introduced double entry bookkeeping in the 15th Century that single idea spawned acceptance of the modern corporation as a vehicle for collaborative business because it created an auditable trail of financial entries. The third party trust and validation business was soon to follow and has blossomed and grown ever since. Until I

Extended time with the grandchildren always leads to the irresistible logic of A.A. Milne and his principal spokesperson, Winnie the Pooh. One of Winnie’s most insightful observations is about doing, or in his case, doing nothing: “People say doing nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.” The investment world has apparently not heard

Writing a weekly blog is a privilege and I usually have more ideas than I can handle, but this week all the news was old news and all the problems were old problems. There wasn’t anything new and exciting until I saw this morning’s edition of The Wall Street Journal, “ObamaCare For Congress” by the