After a Swindler Almost Destroyed American Express, Buffett Saw the Importance of Long-Term Value Versus Short-Term Profit — The story of the Great Salad Oil Swindle can be traced to June 1960, when an anonymous tipster, known as “the Voice,” raised concerns with The American Express Company (Amex) about what was really in tank number 6006 in a warehouse in Bayonne, New Jersey — and it wasn’t just…

An NFT of the New York Mets retired player’s “most famous sports contract of all time” — I just bought my first non-fungible token, commonly known as an NFT. If you know me, you may be surprised. I recently wrote a book with Andrew Lo, In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio, where we interviewed ten luminaries, include six Nobel laureates, as we traced the development of modern…

If you don’t have a view that’s different from the market’s view, you’re better off as a passive investor — After spending decades dedicated to investments research, I’ve come up with some pithy advice for all investors (despite my disclaimer that I don’t provide financial advice). I call it “Steve’s Surefire Method for Earning Millions of Dollars Through Investing” and I’m sure you’ll agree that it is surefire. It’s a…

What a chilling 1994 airline incident can teach investors about the risks of trusting — and overriding — an automated strategy — “Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day” (initially just for daughters) originated in 1993 by Gloria Steinem. Perhaps you have participated, as a child or parent. I have fond memories of my children coming to my office on our university campus, playing on my computer, writing on my office…

They aren’t stable and may be prone to “bank runs” — The cryptocurrency industry is still in its infancy, and the sub-category of stablecoins even more so. However, with an estimated size of around $160 billion — compared with only $11 billion in June 2020 — the stablecoin sector has grown considerably. Trading data for some of the oldest stablecoins are…

Lessons from history on how long markets take to recover, and what investors should do — A few years ago, while tenting in Ontario’s beautiful Algonquin Provincial Park, I woke to the sound of clattering coming from our nearby cooking shelter, a mesh covering around a picnic bench, with our cooking implements. I looked out to see a black bear that had destroyed the shelter’s mesh…

Investing around themes like innovation or emerging economies often underperforms in the long run. Here’s what works instead. — In November 2001, Jim O’Neill, Head of Global Economic Research at Goldman Sachs, published an influential research report titled “Building Better Global Economic BRICs”, coining the acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, and China. He forecast that “Over the next 10 years, the weight of BRICs and especially China in world…

It’s a questionable investment, as his stake in Tesla has already taken a big hit — It’s not every day that an investor files a Schedule 13D with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), indicating they’ve crossed a threshold and now own more than 5 percent of a company, and within three weeks has its bid for the entire company approved by the board of directors…

Harry Markowitz’s Nobel-prize-winning Modern Portfolio Theory still holds up well in the age of cryptocurrencies and meme stocks — An important milestone passed almost unnoticed last month when Modern Portfolio Theory, or MPT, turned seventy. It was in March 1952 when Harry Markowitz published his seminal paper, Portfolio Selection, in the prestigious Journal of Finance. Those fifteen pages not only helped Markowitz win a Nobel Prize in Economics, but…