The price you pay for an investment is the primary determiner of risk. Plain & simple. As legendary value investor Seth Klarman puts it; Risk is not inherent in an investment; it is always relative to the price paid. Uncertainty is not the same as risk. Absolutely! I find that Read more…
With the end of Q1 2011 upon us, and earnings reports to start coming soon, I thought it was a good time to re-look at MLP valuations, specifically the top 5 market cap MLPs and the Alerian MLP index. I posted on year end 2010 values in this post. Below Read more…
**Image by Carl Richards, Buck’s Blog at the NYT. Check out the blog for more simple yet powerful investment messages. Behavior dominates investor under performance. As the simple yet powerful chart above so nicely illustrates investor returns are lower than the very investment classes they are invested in regardless of Read more…
Here is the Income Investor Dashboard for April 2011. Prices are as of the close of markets on March 31, 2011. Despite a very exciting and volatile month not much changed in terms of market prices and yields. At one point during the month US markets were down, on the Read more…
Well, its finally time to put it out there. Since I started blogging I’ve been trying to build a base of background posts to get me to this point. Today, I want to share with you the retirement model that I am using to fund my retirement. I think I Read more…
Sometimes a problem IS a nail and the solution IS a hammer. The famous maxim, ‘to one with a hammer every problem looks like a nail’ is used very often to warn against using the same solutions to solve encountered problems. By the way, this maxim is known as Maslow’s Read more…
“If bank stocks are the best investments you can find for your portfolio, you should fear for you wealth.” Value Investment Institute, March 2011 Pretty strong words. I came across this commentary on banks from the Value Investment Institute and it prompted me to write this post on the suitability Read more…
Most investors, especially US investors, invest almost exclusively in their own country. There is even a name for this in the investing world, home country bias (see the link here). In many ways it is a quite reasonable and understandable phenomenon especially if you follow a maxim like invest in Read more…
Its been a while since I’ve talked about option selling as an income strategy. Actually, my first and only post on the topic was back in mid November of 2010. With the US stock market on a nice uptrend since that time and with volatility being low it hasn’t been Read more…
I’ve had a lot of trouble thinking about investing these past few days. In the past 15 years or so I’ve traveled to and done business in Japan many a time. I have many friends there. My wife and I have enjoyed some great vacations there. I even experienced a Read more…
On Feb 11, 2011 the general partner of KMP went public under the symbol KMI. The GP was taken private by a consortium of private equity firms a few years ago and now is back as a public entity. I’ve posted on KMP several times in the past (latest post Read more…