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Bucks Blog: Talking Numbers With Your Children

June 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Carl Richards is a certified financial planner in Park City, Utah, and is the director of investor education at the BAM Alliance. His book, “The Behavior Gap,” was published this year. His sketches are archived on the Bucks blog.

Few things will humble parents faster than when they realize they’ve made some dumb assumptions about their children. And twice in the last few weeks, my own children have shown me where I’ve gone wrong when it comes to teaching them about money.

I thought my wife and I were covering all the bases. We have talked about budgeting. We have talked about saving. We’ve even talked about why we made certain financial decisions. But guess what we never really talked about? Numbers.

You’ve probably done it, too. Let’s say your children know that you’re buying a new car. You probably wouldn’t talk to them about how much it cost.  After all, they could mention the number to your neighbors, and you wouldn’t want that to happen. So, here’s what I learned from my children. Hopefully, my own experience will help you have better conversations with your own children, as well as your spouse, or anyone else that you share financial decisions with.

1) Don’t hide the numbers

One Saturday afternoon, I decided to stop at the boat shop. I have fond memories of long summer days at the lake, and I wanted to see what it might cost to buy a boat for our family. The fact that we don’t really need a boat probably explains what happened next. But since I was feeling a little sheepish about the whole “needs versus wants” subject, I hid the price tag when my son asked me how much the boat cost.  And I compounded the mistake by making up some funny number, like 54 quarters, to try to throw him off.

I should have shown my son the price and explained: 1) why a boat costs that much; 2) why I think it’s worth that much money; and 3) how we saved as a family over the previous years to afford it (should we decide to buy it). In short, I would have helped my son put the buying decision into context, which leads me to the next lesson.

2) Don’t assume your children think the same as you

One of the best parts about being a parent is getting to watch my children make decisions and try new things. Little did I know that my daughter’s decision to explore soccer would be a lesson for my wife and me. After attending the orientation meeting, my daughter came home and explained what she’d learned, and my wife asked her about the costs to play.

My daughter replied “$20,000,” with just a slight hint of caution.

After seeing my wife’s shocked expression, she was quick to assure her mom that it covered two uniforms and an assortment of other things for the entire season. But, and I think you can see where I’m going, my daughter hadn’t made the connection between the crazy number and what she thought she was getting in return.

To be clear, the disconnect isn’t because we’re a family who uses money as paper towels. And our children know what it means to earn a few dollars doing chores. They have savings accounts. They have an allowance. But it appears that we haven’t taken the time to give my daughter a point of reference for a number as large as $20,000. Because a number this large was unfamiliar, and because she had never played soccer before, she didn’t have any real context to help her understand why it didn’t make any sense at all.

As it turns out, $20,000 was actually the budget for the entire team for the entire season. The cost per player was closer to 1/10th of that number. But my daughter’s experience made it perfectly clear that we had dropped the ball.

So, the next time you’re talking with your children, your spouse or anyone else about money, please make sure that you’re talking about the same thing. Don’t avoid talking about the numbers or the price. And please don’t make the same mistake I did, and assume that it’s not worth having a conversation that gets specific. Based on these experiences, I’m convinced that there would be fewer money issues in our families if we worried less about what people thought and more about what our families know.

I want each of my children to know what things cost so they can weigh the pros and cons of buying this versus buying that. I want my kids to understand just how much money $20,000 is so that they can make a fair judgment about the worth of something compared to what they’re getting in return. And perhaps most important of all, I don’t want my discomfort to stop me from providing my kids with the skills and information they need to make smart money decisions.

I bet you want the same things for your children, too.

Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/talking-numbers-with-your-children/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Bucks Blog: What You Don’t Know About Your Portfolio May Help You

June 11, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Carl Richards is a certified financial planner in Park City, Utah, and is the director of investor education at The BAM Alliance. His book, “The Behavior Gap,” was published this year. His sketches are archived on the Bucks blog.

Back in 2008, a friend of mine left for a two-week trek in Nepal. While he was gone, the entire financial world exploded.

Merrill Lynch was sold to Bank of America. Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection. A.I.G. received an $85 billion loan from the Federal Reserve to avoid bankruptcy.

But here’s the interesting part: he didn’t know anything happened because he didn’t have any connection to the outside world. Although recently retired from the investment industry, my friend would have been glued to his computer. But he had no idea what was going on.

Think about that for a minute. I remember those days. I remember waiting up to see how markets opened in Japan. I remember being so worried that I didn’t sleep for days. And I remember another friend who called me from a cruise ship to ask if things were O.K. He said that many other passengers got off at the first port and flew home to deal with what was happening in the market.

My friend in Nepal missed it all, and it didn’t make one bit of difference. He was actually better off.  All my worrying didn’t change one thing.

In fact, my friend said that when he got back and eventually heard the news, something became crystal clear. He knew exactly what was going to happen for the rest of his life: the markets were either going to move up and then down, and then up and down again — and then he would die. Or, they would go down and up and down and up — and then he would die.

In either scenario, he was still dead. And no amount of obsessing over the stock market would change that.

This idea of being unconnected for a few weeks reminded me of Warren Buffett’s statement: “Benign neglect, bordering on sloth, remains the hallmark of our investment process.”

But it’s still so hard to ignore the market because we’re so connected. We seem to be obsessed with economic news. I’m not sure when exactly it happened, but sometime in the 1990s investing became America’s favorite spectator sport. I knew there was a problem while sitting in my dentist’s office and seeing CNBC on the TV in the lobby. It’s only become more difficult to avoid, now that everyone has a smartphone.

But knowing doesn’t help. And much of the time, it actually hurts. Aside from the tendency to trade too much when we’re following every market move, there’s also the issue of our happiness. It doesn’t feel good when our investments go down, even if it’s just for one day.

We have an aversion to loss. In other words, you’re likely to feel the pain of loss far more acutely than the joy of an investment gain. We feel twice as bad losing money as we do making money. And yet, knowing this, we continue to do things that will cause us pain.

Since many of us use the Standard Poor’s 500-stock index as a proxy for the market, let’s take a look at the period from 1950 to 2012 to see how often we’re likely to feel positive, based on how often we check our investments:

  • If you checked daily, it would be positive 52.8 percent of the time.
  • If you checked monthly, it would be positive 63.1 percent of the time.
  • If you checked quarterly, it would be positive 68.7 percent of the time.
  • If you checked annually, it would be positive 77.8 percent of the time.

So here’s the thing to ask yourself. Other than upsetting yourself half of the time, what good is it doing you to look anyway? Maybe we should all invest as if we’re going on a 12-month trek in Nepal!

So along with your do-nothing streak, let’s see how long you can go without looking at your investments (assuming you’re in a low-cost, diversified portfolio, of course). I think you’ll discover that it makes you happier, keeps you from doing something stupid and helps you become a more successful investor.

Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/what-you-dont-know-about-your-portfolio-may-help-you/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Bucks: The Perils of Investing in What You Know

April 22, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Carl Richards is a certified financial planner in Park City, Utah, and is the director of investor education at The BAM Alliance. His book, “The Behavior Gap,” was published this year. His sketches are archived on the Bucks blog.

If you’re my generation or older, you probably remember Peter Lynch.

He was the famous manager of Fidelity’s Magellan Fund from 1977 to 1990. While Mr. Lynch’s track record covers only 13 years, it’s easy to see why many consider him to be one of the greatest investment managers of all time.

When he took over the fund in 1977, it had only $18 million in assets. But when he retired in 1990, the fund had grown to $19 billion in assets. Over those 13 years, Mr. Lynch managed to achieve a compounded average investment return of 29.2 percent, while the Standard Poor’s 500 Index only rose 15.8 percent

On top of being a great manager, Mr. Lynch was also a prolific and talented writer. It was said that his approach to investing was so simple and clearly written in his books —  ”One Up on Wall Street” and “Beating the Street” — that he inspired many do-it-yourself investors and future managers.

I have a favorite Lynch saying: “Never invest in any idea you can’t illustrate with a crayon.” I think my reasons for liking that particular one are obvious. But I’m seeing a troubling trend related to another one of Mr. Lynch’s ideas: Invest in what you know.  People are using it to justify dangerous investing decisions.

This brand of investing was made famous by the great stories that Mr. Lynch told, particularly about individual stocks. For instance, he once told a story about how his wife loved a new Hanes product so much — L’eggs pantyhose — that he bought Hanes stock. It became the largest portion of the fund, and fundholders eventually enjoyed a 30-fold appreciation in the stock.

As fun as it can be to hear these stories, when they are viewed in isolation they can be incredibly dangerous for investors. And Mr. Lynch isn’t alone in being taken out of context. Warren Buffett has offered similar advice about how you should never invest in businesses that you don’t understand.

But here’s the thing we need to remember: Whatever the advice, it’s just the starting point for investors like Mr. Lynch and Mr. Buffett, not the end point. Yes, they may have started with things they knew. But they also did a bunch of research, and it’s this second part that’s missing from many investors’ decision-making process.

It seems crazy to assume that buying what you know should replace research, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping people. I’ve heard more than one person justify a decision to buy Apple stock because they really love their iPhone. That’s about as wise as buying Crumbs’ stock because you love their cupcakes. But that doesn’t seem to have stopped individual investors from buying shares of Apple. As a Times story noted last week:

The investment firm SigFig estimated last fall that 17 percent of all retail investors owned Apple stock, four times the number that owns the average stock in the Dow Jones industrial average.

If you pick and invest in individual stocks, what you’re really doing is focusing on just one piece of Mr. Lynch and Mr. Buffet’s advice. And for most of us, that’s just too risky. It makes more sense to invest in diversified, low-cost index funds. (In fact, Mr. Buffet bet that an index fund would beat a set of hedge funds; he’s winning that bet.)

And even though Mr. Lynch and Mr. Buffett clearly stand above the rest of us mere mortals, one piece of their advice doesn’t replace the other requirements of good investing behavior.

 

Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/22/the-perils-of-investing-in-what-you-know/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Bucks: The Question You Should Be Asking About the Stock Market

February 4, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Carl Richards

Carl Richards is a financial planner in Park City, Utah, and is the director of investor education at the BAM Alliance. His book, “The Behavior Gap,” was published last year. His sketches are archived on the Bucks blog.

With the stock market up more than 100 percent from those scary days in early 2009 and up 16 percent in 2012 alone, we’re now hearing plenty about how small investors are getting back into the market. Andrew Wilkinson, the chief economic strategist at Miller Tabak Associates, referred to it as a “a real sea change in investor outlook.”

It seems we’re in danger of repeating the same old cycle of swearing off stocks forever during scary markets, missing a huge rally and then deciding it’s time to buy when stocks are high again. On the flip side, I’ve had a number of conversations with Main Street investors who are asking if now is the time to sell because the Dow Jones Industrial Average is hovering near 14,000 and the SP 500 stock index is around 1,500 again.

So which one is it? Should everyday investors be buying or selling?

Do you see the problem here?

If we’re investing based on what the market has done, it’s a recipe for disaster. Recent market performance tells us almost nothing useful about what the market will do in the near future. Logically it seems like it should, but a quick review of the market’s performance during the last six years should be evidence enough to convince us that it doesn’t.

Remember how you felt in March, 2009? I bet you didn’t feel like investing, and you weren’t alone. Almost no one did. It was a scary time. But it turns out that it would have been a brilliant time to invest. Again, not because of what the market had done, but what it was about to do.

But there was no way to know that in March 2009.

Did anyone expect (or feel) like 2012 was going to turn into a 16 percent year? In fact, almost all the unfortunate souls that make their living predicting the markets got 2012 wrong.

Here’s the thing we need to remember: we have no idea if now is the time to be buying or selling. But the good news is that it’s not even the question we should be asking. Instead we should be asking, “How can we avoid making the big behavioral mistake of selling low and buying high (again!) in the future?”

Instead of worrying about getting in or out of the market at the right time, take that time to focus on crafting a portfolio based on your goals. Start by taking out a piece of paper and writing a personal investment policy statement that addresses the following:

  1. Why are you investing this money in the first place? What are your goals?
  2. How much do you need in cash, bonds and stocks to give you the best chance of meeting those goals while taking the least amount of risk?
  3. What actual investments will you buy to populate that plan and why? Make sure you address issues like diversification and expenses.
  4. How often will you revisit this plan to make sure you’re doing what you said you would do and to make changes to your investments to get them back in line with what you said in number 2?

A personal investment policy statement can be one of the most important guardrails against the emotional investment decisions that we all regret in hindsight. So, when you get worried about the markets and are tempted to sell everything you own that has anything to do with stocks, go back to that piece of paper. If your goals haven’t changed, forget about it.

And when you get excited about that initial public offering that your brother-in-law says he can “get you in on,” pull out that piece of paper. If your goals haven’t changed, forget about it.

When your neighbors are all wrapped up in how the latest apocalypse du jour is going to ruin everyone’s retirement, pull out that piece of paper. If your goals haven’t changed, forget about it.

I know this might not work all the time. In fact, it might not work at all when we’re scared and dead set on getting out. But my hope is that having something we wrote when we weren’t scared will give us a little time to pause and ask a few questions before we do something that might end up being a mistake.

As a result, maybe, just maybe, we can shift the focus away from whether now is the right time to buy or sell and place it squarely on whether that decision fits into our own, personal investment plans.

 

Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/04/the-question-you-should-be-asking-about-the-stock-market/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Bucks Blog: The Appeal of Investments That Cost More and Return Less

January 22, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Carl Richards

Carl Richards is a financial planner in Park City, Utah, and is the director of investor education at the BAM Alliance. His book, “The Behavior Gap,” was published last year. His sketches are archived on the Bucks blog.

People seem to be sticking with hedge funds, despite another terrible year in a terrible decade of performance, according to The Economist:

“The SP 500 has now outperformed its hedge-fund rival for 10 straight years, with the exception of 2008 when both fell sharply. A simple-minded investment portfolio, 60 percent of it in [stock] shares and the rest in sovereign bonds, has delivered returns of more than 90 percent over the last decade, compared with a meager 17 percent after fees for hedge funds.”

On top of that, investors are paying through the nose for the privilege of investing in hedge funds. Felix Salmon points out:

“Steve Cohen’s SAC Capital, marred by insider trading investigations, made it to the top of Bloomberg Markets’ ranking of the most profitable hedge funds this year, not because of performance but because of fees. Instead of the usual 2 and 20 fee structure, SAC reportedly charges a 3 percent management fee and as much as 50 percent of its clients’ profits.”

The question that I can’t stop asking myself is why?

Why, despite this body of evidence and our experience to the contrary, do people think that once you have a bunch of money you’ve somehow outgrown the simple, low-cost investment tools that most academics think you should use, like broadly diversified index funds and basic, safe fixed-income instruments?

I can think of a few possible reasons.

First, that’s just what rich, smart people do, right? It’s just another piece of (bogus) investing folklore: Once you have a big pile of money to invest, the solution must be complicated. And the more complicated and secretive and exclusive it is, the better.

Second, people want to believe there’s a better way of investing that’s only available to a select few. This idea of using plain old mutual funds is for the common folk. People think, “I’ve got to get access to the best minds in the industry, and they’re in the heads of people who go manage hedge funds, right?”

Finally, there’s a perverse belief that if something is more expensive, it simply has to be better.

But when it comes to investing, as Vanguard Group’s founder, John Bogle said, “You get what you don’t pay for.”

This is just cold, hard math. If an investment earns 10 percent, and you’re paying a 3 percent management fee plus 50 percent of profits (or even 2 and 20), you’re going to keep a lot less of your money than with an investment that earns 10 percent and only charges a management fee of 0.5 percent or 0.25 percent, like an index mutual fund or exchange-traded fund might.

I once worked with an attorney who represented a large family endowment that wanted a new investing strategy. So I walked him through a simple, well-diversified, low-cost portfolio. I gave him the returns and the risk numbers. They were impressive. But this was just a plain vanilla portfolio.

Three other groups made pitches. Those folks came with two-inch-thick proposals and flew people in to give presentations. Their strategies were pretty complicated with lots of bells and whistles. But their performance numbers weren’t quite as good.

Not long after the pitches, the lawyer called to say that his client had decided to go in different direction. He told me it was because my plan seemed too basic.

I knew this attorney pretty well. I waited a few days, and then I took the same numbers from my too-basic portfolio and moved the return number down a little, bumped the risk number up a little and charged a slightly higher fee.

I sent the numbers to the lawyer and called him and said something like, “Hey, did you look at those numbers? The strategy involves a proprietary fund run by some of the smartest people I’ve ever met. They won’t even reveal their process because it’s basically rocket science in a box.”

His response? “Wow, we’d like to hear more about that.”

I’m curious: Why do you think people still invest in hedge funds? What am I missing?

 

Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/22/the-appeal-of-investments-that-cost-more-and-return-less/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Bucks Blog: A Warning About That Guy Who Is Beating the Market

December 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Carl Richards

Carl Richards is a financial planner in Park City, Utah, and is the director of investor education at the BAM Alliance. His book, “The Behavior Gap,” was published this year. His sketches are archived on the Bucks blog.

I’m sure I’m not alone in running into “that guy.”

You know, the guy who always seems to make the best investment decisions. I seem to run into him (and it’s almost always a “him”) everywhere: the neighborhood barbecue, the company party or even a family event. Maybe it’s your co-worker or your brother-in-law.

Based on the stories he tells you every time you run into him, making money in the stock market is easy. Picking the best mutual funds, easy! Beating the S.P. 500, easy! Then, in his oh-so-casual way, he says, “If I can do it, anyone can do it. It’s easy.”

These run-ins used to leave me with a sick feeling in my stomach. I wondered what I was doing wrong. How come that guy makes it sound so easy? How come his experience seems to be so different from mine? I must be missing something, right?

Here’s a perfect example of “that guy” in action.

Dave Ramsey recently answered a question about investing with this:

I recommend mutual funds because they always beat the S.P. … For example, take a mutual fund with a 25-year track record.  Over the course of those 25 years if you can see that the mutual fund almost always beats the S.P., then that mutual fund contains stocks that are winning more than the overall market is winning.

At the end of his answer (it’s on the audio, but not reflected in the transcript), Mr. Ramsey concludes with, “But I’ve honestly done better” than 12 percent, “and I’m no rocket scientist.”

I think most of us hear 12 percent (Mr. Ramsey has mentioned this number before), and our jaws drop. Combined with his certainty (“always beat the S.P.”), it’s hard to square what he says with what the rest of us have experienced. We must be doing something wrong, right? (Mr. Ramsey’s public relations representative did not respond to messages seeking comment.)

When I asked the Reuters blogger Felix Salmon about all of this, he confirmed something similar among the people he knows:

In New York, there’s a huge class of people earning in the $200,000 to $500,000 range who have money, don’t feel rich, and — most importantly — have very rich friends. When I meet them, they invariably tell me about their very rich friends and how those very rich friends are always making the most amazing investments, selling all their stocks and going to gold right before the financial crisis, etc. etc. It really is a Thing.

So the next time you’re talking to “that guy,” remember that you aren’t alone. Other people feel the same way. In an effort to help you with that sick feeling in your stomach, here are a few of the facts.

1) Beating an index isn’t a financial goal

Getting a better return than your neighbor isn’t a financial goal either. I realize that this is not necessarily the goal of many financial gurus either. Still, it’s important to understand that a real financial goal is, say, sending your children to college or having enough money to retire.

Sure, getting the best return you can is a part (I’d argue a small part) of the equation. But remember that it’s possible to beat an index and still retire broke if you don’t focus on the things that really matter, such as how much you save, what you spend, how much you earn and having realistic goals.

2) Skill versus luck

If your conversations with “that guy” veer toward past performance, remember that you still need to determine if that mutual fund did well because of skill or luck. In other words, is the performance repeatable? And will it happen again once your money is in the fund?

Statistically, even if a fund beat the market average for 25 years we still can’t say with any degree of confidence it was because the manager was skillful versus lucky. Prof. Ken French at Dartmouth has already worked out these numbers. If you assume the fund beats the market by five percentage points per year, which is a huge number, and had volatility of 20 percent per year, you would still need 64 years of data before you could be confident the superior performance was because of something other than luck.

64 years!

The point is that finding skill in the world of mutual funds is almost impossible, and betting your retirement money on luck sounds like a bad idea to me.

3) Rear-view-mirror investing leads to accidents

Even though it seems logical, making investment decisions based on past performance doesn’t add up. In almost every other area — business, construction, medicine — past performance matters. But with investing, past performance tells us virtually nothing about future performance. At this point, it’s settled doctrine. The academics, regulatory agencies and most professionals agree: when it comes to investing, past performance has zero predictive value.

But for the sake of argument, let’s say there is some value in past performance. Most thoughtful people will not argue that it’s impossible for a mutual fund manager to outperform the market. The bigger question is this: How will you identify that manager in advance?

When you’re talking to “that guy,” be prepared to hear how much he thinks the past influences the future. Now you know better.

4) Reversion to the mean

I know this probably never happens to you, but I’ve found that just about the time I think I’ve identified the best investment, and I decide to buy it, it turns into the not-so-great investment.

It turns out there’s data to support this pattern. If we look at all mutual funds that have been around for 25 years (and they are rarer than you might think), 62 percent outperformed the SP 500 over the last 15 years. This (and the figures below) is according to Morningstar’s Principia database.

Keep in mind that, presumably, the only funds still around after 25 years are ones that have done well. So the 62 percent figure overstates the performance of all funds over time. We call this surviviorship bias.

Meanwhile, when we look at the last 10 years, that number plummets to 37 percent. And keep in mind that we’re including precious metal funds, bond funds, everything — not just stock funds.

Then consider what happens if we look only at funds in Morningstar’s large-blend category of stock mutual funds instead of all funds, as we did previously. Among those funds, only 47 percent beat the S.P. 500 over 15 years. And here’s the reality check: only 32 percent have done it over the last 10 years

The law of averages tells us there’s an increasing likelihood that if a fund has done well in the past, it’s less likely to do well in the future. At some point it’s going to revert back to the mean. So about the time you think you’ve identified the next hot manager, it’s about time for that manager to be the not-so-hot manager.

5) If it’s too good to be true, it often is

Beating 12 percent per year is incredible. People who can achieve those returns year in and year out should be running their own hedge fund. For perspective, consider that among large-cap blend stock mutual funds (funds that should use the S.P. 500 as a benchmark) with a 25-year record, not one had an annualized return of greater than 12 percent over the past 10 or 15 years.

When looking at all mutual funds with a 25-year history, there are only a few that have beaten 12 percent annualized over the last 10 years, and most of those are funds that invest primarily in precious metals. I suspect that 10 years ago most of us weren’t willing to bet our retirement money on mutual funds invested in precious metals, and I sure hope no one is doing that now.

The issue isn’t whether you’re hearing something like this from some self-styled investment guru or your brother-in-law. What does matter is that we need to have realistic investing expectations, and “that guy” rarely provides them. So while some people may claim to have no problem hitting 12 percent, I have yet to see an academic study or hear any planning professional suggest that 12 percent is a realistic number for building a plan.

To see what I’m talking about, let’s walk through two hypothetical examples and use the simple calculator found at Bloomberg.com. For this little experiment, we’ll focus only on the portion of your portfolio invested in stocks.

In one plan, let’s use 12 percent, and in the other let’s use 7 percent. Say you’re 25 years old, and you’re starting a savings plan with no money. Your goal is to have $2 million by the time you retire at 65.

So how much do you need to save? You could:

  • Base your plan on 12 percent, which means you need to save $217 a month.
  • Base your plan on 7 percent, which means you need to save $834 a month.

Do you understand the implications of these assumptions now? In this hypothetical world, you can assume 12 percent, and if you’re wrong, you’re in big trouble. On the other hand, if you take the more conservative approach and assume 7 percent on the portion you have in stocks, and you wake up 40 years from now having earned more than that, it’s fantastic.

That’s why this issue is so important. If you’re serious about your financial goals, you can’t afford to take “that guy” seriously. I wish there was a shortcut or some magic way to find the best investments, but the fact of the matter is that meeting your goals is about boring things like saving as much as you can, knowing not to chase after past performance and avoiding the pain of buying high and selling low. Counting on a high number like 12 percent takes your eye off those things that matter and over which you have some control.

Now, back to “that guy.” Over time, I’ve learned just to ignore those guys. I used to try to reason with them, but that is a waste of time. It’s a little bit like trying to have a logical conversation with a teenager.

So if you find yourself at a barbecue and “that guy” tries to start up a conversation about his investment prowess, maybe it’s time to excuse yourself and go see if the hamburgers are ready.

 

Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/a-warning-about-that-guy-who-is-beating-the-market/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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