PE4FAMs Blog

A career in financial services has been a wonderful place to be for the last 40 years. Powerful macrotrends like 40 years of falling interest rates, Moore’s law with the doubling of computing power every several years, the emergence of a sophisticated credit economy, a plethora of worldwide investable capital and an almost error-free infrastructure […]

As we start a new investment year and take inventory of bad habits to avoid and good ones to enhance, I come back to some value investing principles foremost of which is first do no harm or spoken in investment language, avoid losses. However, had you burrowed into your foxhole during the second half of

As a recent user of ChatGPT I was not aware my version 3.5 which is free is much less powerful than version 4.0 which costs $20/month. So, I bought the upgrade and put it to a test. I have been slightly disappointed with Chat’s ability to search data and synthesize financial information. For example, its

Can you recall your first experience with bubblegum in your hair? It was stickier than you thought and your attempts to eradicate it only spread it more? More painful, however, was you looked like a dork for two weeks after your mother cut out patches of your hair. Inflation is a lot like bubblegum in

Howard Marks, the founder of Oaktree Capital, is a prolific communicator. He has written letters to his investors since he began managing capital in the mid- 1980’s. While he started with a very stable asset class – corporate bonds – over time he moved into a much riskier neighborhood called “distressed debt” and high yield-aka

This was the first summer I can remember when there was not a stretch of good weather for more than 5 days in a row. What I mean by good weather is also being redefined. Endless rain, big winds, small craft warnings almost every day, and serious flooding were commonplace in New England. But you

Depending on whom you ask you will get a different perspective about having the U.S. Dollar as the reserve currency for the world and the medium of exchange for oil and other essential commodities. If you live in Turkey, Venezuela, or Argentina, and have persistent, high double-digit inflation, holding U.S. dollars as a store of

One of the smartest investors I know taught me “you don’t bank percentages” so even if your bonus is ten percent, if it is applied to below market base pay you likely would be earning less than someone who got 5 % bonus on a higher base. In addition, the base number is a fixed

Chevy Chase immortalized the American vacation with the Griswold family’s cross-country journey to Wally World.  That was the travel scene in the 1980s before Covid-19, inflation, forest fires, thermal inversions, flash floods, passport processing snafus, sold out National Parks, double digit lodging taxes, shortages of hospitality workers, road construction delays, crime in major cities, summer