Introduction This week in Outside the Box we take a gander at the always-insightful research of good friend James Montier, who poignantly addresses the pertinent topic of portfolio diversification and the pitfalls that ensue on account of benchmarking, wherein investors obsess over relative performance...
Introduction Today's Outside the Box is by James Montier of Dresdner Kleinwort. Quite frankly, the research that James discusses surprised me. In his article "Meaty beaty big and bouncy," James dispels what he calls an urban myth that small caps tend to outperform large caps. If you disentangle...
Introduction General reader, today's Outside the Box is one that you are going to want to put your thinking caps on for. My good friend Woody Brock has kindly allowed me to present you with one of the sections from his quarterly comments. In his chapter "Deconstructing Today's Ongoing Revolution...
Introduction Does the concept of retirement sound scary? If it does don't feel that you're alone. A lot of issues and concerns come along with the subject, the most familiar of which is financial freedom. Even after you have saved a substantial nest egg, it can be difficult to plan out your withdrawal...
Introduction This week I am in South Africa. At the moment I am literally flying from Johannesburg to Durban in a single-engine Pilates PC 12, a very upscale Swiss-manufactured plane. I am told pilots will know and appreciate the plane. It is supposedly the safest plane in the world, which is somewhat...
Introduction Today's "Outside the Box" will feature an essay by good friend David Kotok of Cumberland Advisors. In his article, David discusses what the development of a global economy means for currencies and the financial markets. He distills the foreign exchange markets into 4 major...
Introduction I am pleased to present to you a thoughtful piece by good friend and business partner Jon Sundt in today's "Outside the Box." Jon is the President of Altegris Investments and a very insightful thinker. In his article "Lost in America? Asset Allocation and the Old Brain...
Introduction In my Friday letter, Thoughts from the Frontline (you can view it here ), we looked at how valuation and prices change over market cycles. As I mentioned and have written about extensively in my book Bull's Eye Investing, market cycles should be viewed in terms of valuation and not prices...
Introduction One of the positive things about international travel is that it gives me a large amount of time to read and think. This week we are going to look at some of that reading on the current issues surrounding the apparent willingness of investors to court ever increasing amounts of risk in the...