Market insights and analysis

Norm, a character on the 1980s sitcom “Cheers,” is a down-on-his-luck type of guy and a regular at the titular Boston pub. He tries to get ahead but never quite makes any progress. So every day he comes back to the place “where everybody knows your name.”

What a great idea Thanksgiving Day was. Our ancestors set aside a day designed simply to give thanks for all the bounties of this life. This year, as my brother and sister would say, “We had so much fun!” Family came together; the new baby, Natalie, was naturally the focus; a feast was prepared and enjoyed by all; and, of course, the Detroit Lions lost.

Since I began investing in the late 1960s, I have always been in the active investing camp. When I started Flexible Plan Investments, Ltd., in 1981, the only investment services we offered were active management (and that is still true today). I thought an investment manager should be “flexible” rather than locked into a rigid buy-and-hold approach.

Last week was a wild ride in cryptocurrency land. On November 4, the largest and most well-known proxy for the cryptocurrency space, bitcoin, traded around $21,130 USD per bitcoin. By Monday morning, it was trading below $16,000, a drop of nearly 25%.

With an estimated 10,000 baby boomers reaching the retirement age of 65 each day over the next eight years, it is little wonder that both the general media and financial press are saturated with retirement-focused content. And there are many good reasons for that.

Investors often ask me, “What is active management?” Many confuse the phrase “active management” with the simple act of running a mutual fund populated with stock picks within the strict guidelines of a prospectus, as opposed to running an index fund, where the manager simply buys and holds the shares making up a particular stock or bond index.

It’s October, and Halloween is just around the corner. But at Flexible Plan Investments (FPI), we’re always searching for the monsters in your investment portfolio.

Decisions. We have to make them every day on a whole range of matters. While most decisions seem to revolve around choosing between alternatives, another category of decisions tends to be more critical in the scheme of things.

I am sure anyone interested in major league baseball has followed—either fanatically closely (like New York Yankees supporters) or just as casual fans of the game—the remarkable 2022 season of the Yankees’ outfielder Aaron Judge.

I was reading some history recently that focused on the Second World War. It contradicted a long-held belief. I’d always heard that the Maginot Line was a colossal failure.

It was over 30 years ago. I sat in a pew in a little church on the village green of Franklin, Michigan. It was the usual Sunday service, but I was stirred by the sermon from a minister who was still relatively new to me.

Throughout my life, I have been a fan of science fiction. To pick up a book that can take me on a journey through space or time has never failed to remove me from the everyday and broaden my horizons.

“Nothing is certain except death and taxes.” How often that phrase has been quoted since Ben Franklin penned it in a letter to his friend, the French scientist Jean-Baptiste Leroy, in the midst of the French Revolution.

A few years ago, staff members were waiting for us at the airport, which was teeming with people when the transatlantic plane touched down. In a crowded, cavernous room, with signs everywhere, they found our luggage and escorted us through customs. Whisked into a private car, they sped us to the dock and our rivercraft.

Over the years I have written about “Plan B Investing” and “Just-In-Case Investing.” Both of these are similar but different.