Blog

Frank Boland
September 05, 2023

Is it possible for seven stocks to represent the economic activity of the other 493? Especially when six of the seven are essentially in the same business. Advertising, communication or both.  As we all know, there are 500 stocks in the Standard & Poor’s index. What is less widely known is, the S&P index was introduced in 1957 to the “...

.
Frank Boland
August 04, 2023

Ours is a unique consumer driven economy. Estimates put it at 60-63% of our GDP. If we were to think of the economy as one large operating business, it would have a 330 million customer base. Such a focus would make it not only the largest business in the world (which it is) but one whose customer base had the highest standard of living.  Its...

.
Frank Boland
July 12, 2023

The enclosed chart of Fed funds is illustrative of what enabled the outperformance of active managers at the start of the modern investment era and what subsequently penalized their performance for the last 30 years.  The cause: it was the dramatic rise and fall in interest rates. The chart shows, the secular direction of...

.
Frank Boland
June 06, 2023

It was easily 30 years ago … probably longer. I was sitting in a client’s house in Exeter, New Hampshire. My client was a man in his late sixties who had been an M.I.T. graduate. As such, he had an elevated level of self-confidence. I handed him a sheet of his holdings which showed profit and losses. It had been a difficult...

.

Do we have the capability to eliminate booms and busts in economic activity? The answer in my judgment is no, because there is no tool to change human nature. Too often people are prone to recurring bouts of optimism and pessimism.

– Alan Greenspan