Bob French, CFA

People seem to think commodities (especially gold) are suitable guards against inflation. I want to explain why that’s not true – at least over any useful time frame – and then tell you about some of the much better tools available. Commodities are just things. They don’t produce any value in and of themselves. They’re…

Mass customization is the dream for most industries, and the financial services industry is no different. Everyone’s investing goals are different, so it makes sense that we would want to be able to specifically design the funds that we use to reach our goals. The plethora of mutual funds and ETFs out there give us…

People are a lot like snowflakes. If you don’t look all that closely, we’re all roughly similar. But the closer you start looking, the more different we are. We all have our own unique situations and experiences, and these drive who we are. This also describes who we are as investors. We can make big,…

It’s a bit of an understatement to say that GameStop has been in the news lately. There are a lot of people opining about what is going on, but we want to cut through that and look at what actually happened (we look at what it all means in another article. So what actually happened,…

It’s been a pretty wild ride with GameStop. But while there has been a lot happening, does it actually mean much? We’ve examined the details of what happened elsewhere, so I’m going to focus on some of the bigger questions that this whole affair raises, and specifically how this all impacts long-term investors. So let’s…

There’s no magic formula for investing. The financial markets seem to take some sort of cosmic joy in bringing people back down to Earth. And it’s value investing’s turn – in fact, it’s been value investing’s turn for a while now. To put it mildly, this has been a rough decade and a half for…

Interest rates are one of the key tools that the Federal Reserve has to manage the economy. Changing how much it costs to borrow money (even if the Federal Reserve doesn’t have complete control of this) can slow down an overheating economy or give a slower economy the nudge that it might need. Recently the…