In Search of the Perfect Investment

A reader questions “Can stock picking beat the S&P 500?” For most people (including me), the answer is a resounding NO.

Buying an index fund or an index ETF and practicing benign neglect is a seriously good idea. Nice chart for the SPY over the past ten years:

Temper your index funds with  occasional stocks that feature in your buying or daily habits, e.g. Amazon, Home Depot, Facebook. And hold them.

But you should follow what the investment gurus say. It’s often interesting — but often wrong.

Latest fascinating reading is from Stanley Druckenmiller, one of the most succcessful hedge fund managers of all time. He has loaded up on gold and gold miners — on the theory that they’re out of favor today and everything else is so cursedly expensive. His views are summarized in a Seeking Alpha piece:

For Investment Success Today, Just Turn 1980 Upside Down

Summary

+ The early 1980s were the start of tremendous bull runs for both stocks and Treasuries.

+ The investment conditions today are the exact opposite of the early 1980s, so why wouldn’t the best assets to own be the opposite as well.

+ The one asset that everyone wanted to own in the 1980s was the one that they shouldn’t have. Today, that asset is the one that Druckenmiller advocates.

I don’t want to reproduce his impressive charts, nor his buy conclusions.  You can (and should) read the entire article here.

Brexit vote still in doubt. No one can call this. I suspect that Great Britain will stay in the EU. But it was pretty dumb of U.K. Prime Minister James Cameron calling for a vote on a subject as complicated as Brexit. I suspect that fewer than 0.001% of U.K. voters have any serious notion of what Brexit really means.

 Recommended reading:

+  Post-Port Arthur gun laws put end to mass shootings, saw decline in firearm killings by Michael Edwards

There have been no fatal mass shootings in the 20 years since Australia introduced tough gun laws and the overall rate in firearm killings has declined, a study has shown.

The research, published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, examined firearm violence in Australia since the introduction of John Howard’s ban on semi-automatic weapons after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre.

Professor Simon Chapman, public health expert at Sydney University Emeritus and the lead researcher on the project, said they now had hard evidence to show the repercussions from strict gun control laws.

“If you take away the means of committing a mass killing with firearms, you don’t have mass killings for the next 20 years,” he said.

“That’s been our experience here [Australia].”

Read the Michael Edwards piece here.

+ THE SHADOW DOCTORS. The underground race to spread medical knowledge as the Syrian regime erases it.

In the past five years, the Syrian government has assassinated, bombed, and tortured to death almost seven hundred medical personnel, according to Physicians for Human Rights, an organization that documents attacks on medical care in war zones. (Non-state actors, including isis, have killed twenty-seven.) Recent headlines announced the death of the last pediatrician in Aleppo, the last cardiologist in Hama. A United Nations commission concluded that “government forces deliberately target medical personnel to gain military advantage,” denying treatment to wounded fighters and civilians “as a matter of policy.”

And you thought ISIS was bad. They got nothing on Assad and his bunch. They are amazingly bad. Click here.

 I continue to love Instagram. For your pleasure here are some of today’s photos from Instagram streams I follow:

Harry Newton who’s inspired to go out and take some really great photos, also. I suspect I’ll never match what I can see on Instagram for free n the comfort of my couch. Yesterday I highlighted some of the feeds I follow. Click here.