PE4FAMs Blog

My winter experience in Southwest Florida included watching the “BMFR” index redline at levels of conspicuous wealth not seen in my lifetime. For those of you who do not visit the Naples area, the BMFR index is the number of Bentley’s, Maserati’s, Ferraris and Rolls Royce’s you see on a regular basis on Fifth Avenue. […]

As we emerge from our Covid-19 caves and rejoin business, commercial and personal worlds, I have begun to wonder what institutions, interactions, professions, entertainment and lifestyles will be altered in a material way. For most of my life I have been on a hamster wheel of expected behaviors like showing up for work, interactions being

I have a friend who has spent most of his career upgrading the plumbing on Wall Street.  He is not a pipe wrench plumber, but rather one of the architects of the programmatic trading platforms for some of the 40 providers of liquidity that comprise the US stock market. He now works for a prestigious

If you think trying to understand Bitcoin (BTC) and its blockchain is difficult, wait until you have your first encounter with decentralized banking or insurance products. It will seem as daunting and risky as climbing Everest without a sherpa. Because I am not qualified to guide in this emerging territory, I have asked Will Mason,

My generation’s interaction with money, wealth, art, music, communication, commercial real estate, credit, finance, personal real estate, insurance and social interaction has mostly been through trusted third parties like Chase Bank, Goldman Sachs, Fidelity, Sotheby, National Title, Experian, Moody’s, Berkshire Hathaway, Depositary Trust Clearing Corp, ASCAP, Facebook, Apple and Google. These middlemen often have well

Someone’s investment gyroscope is completely out of whack. For most of my investment life I have tried to discover unseen gems among the trash heap of abandoned stocks. These might be stocks with good revenue growth, low debt, high cash flows, a defensible position relative to other competitors and few financial analysts following their story.

I wish I could join the throng of euphoric pundits who are now advocating Modern Monetary Theory (“MMT”). Most of them equate MMT with the ascendancy of central banks and their invincibility procuring worldwide prosperity even in the face of one of the swiftest business reversals in my lifetime. Politicians also see it as a

Bitcoin looks like a juicy federal and state revenue source for 2020. Based on the chart shown from the buybitcoinworldwide.com website below, there has been approximately $304 billion of capital appreciation in the cryptocurrency since January 1, 2020. It is pretty much a guess about what portion of that appreciation has been “realized” in 2020,

“Tell Her No” was a classic rock hit from a British rock group The Zombies. The 1965 lyrics should be exhumed and applied to the runaway market appreciation in those public stocks where operating earnings do not even cover the annual interest expense: “And if she should tell you come closerAnd if she tempts you

For the last three months we have been so fixated on red and blue states we hardly noticed how many “black and blue” states are struggling from the pandemic’s onslaught. Unlike the Federal system where money printing of all kinds and deficit spending are accepted monetary policy tools, states are prohibited both from printing money