Yesterday I was chatting with someone about market returns since 2000. He mentioned with a chuckle an analyst who had stayed in bonds most of the past 8 years out of an aversion to risk assets, "that guy missed the boat big time," he chuckled, "you can't just be in bonds."

Well maybe you can't. Or maybe you can. It really depends on one's personal preference and assessment of relative risk. It also ought to depend on relative price and one's chosen investment discipline.

At our firm we have not held only bonds for the past 8 years, so I am not here defending bonds only as "the best" strategy. At our firm, we (unlike 95% of investment advisors) are not passive, long always in our asset allocation. We actually make a constant effort to manage risk exposure for our clients. We don't believe in tossing capital in, going golfing, and hoping it all works out.   more »

In recent months, BNN often does not archive guest clips on its web site, but today they did post a ...   more »

My interview with Mike Eppel on 680AM All News Radio in Toronto (embedded audio)   more »

Recently BNN has changed its web site video archive so that guest clips are generally no longer avaliable on line ...   more »

Recent headlines about the financial world and its new cast of fraudsters and fools can be a bit disheartening for ...   more »

The crisis explained through the magic of YouTube.   more »

"In a world of conspicuous consumption, mass marketing, and the nonstop influx of competing stimuli assaulting every sense 24/7/365 urging consumer buyin to the fastfood life even while condemning it, financial expert and author Danielle Park says STOP."-- M. Lawson   more »

"We started the year with a more pessimistic view of the housing and home improvement markets than many. It turns out we were not pessimistic enough."
----Frank Blake, Home Depot chairman and CEO, Nov 13, 2007.
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Since 2005 we have been sceptical of the earnings reports coming out of many financial companies and other service industries ...   more »

Yesterday The New York Times reminded readers of a key point that I spend a lot of my time preaching ...   more »

In their wide-spread perfection of off-book accounting fraud, US financials are making ENRON executives look like a haggle of harmless ...   more »

Thanks to Victor Adair and Howe Street for taking the time to chat with me about Juggling Dynamite at the Canadian Resource Conference in Toronto Oct 22:

"If you are a bear, you must accept that you will always be wrong in polite society, and you will continue to be wrong all the way down to the bottom of recession. That is the cross that bears must bear."   more »

Home owners in the US have been walking away from their mortgages in droves, leaving their keys and negative equity in the hands of their lenders. This trend is escalating with no end, as yet, in sight. People have bought the attributes of wealth in mass with little to no money down all on the magic of low rates and borrowed money. But money really is not free and there is a real cost to overspending and under-saving. Millions of people are now discovering that they are actually living a life they cannot afford. Trying to spend our way to prosperity has left nothing under the mattress for those inevitable rainy days.
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