Everything is Connected
|Should you buy a stock whose price is at a 52-week or all-time high? Or does this even matter to someone looking to invest for the long term?| Some very smart investors offer conflicting advice. It has been argued that the overall trend of the market is the key driver of short-term gains or losses. … Continue reading “Getting High”
|We need only enjoy the magic of what can be described as a six-song diary of the Dave Brubeck Quartet on tour to foreign and exotic places.| _______________________________________ Ruminations about jazz vs. classical appear fairly often here at JazzNotes. Whether it’s clearly stated, such as Gunther Schuller’s The Birth of the Third Stream, or more … Continue reading “The Classical Jazz of Dave Brubeck”
|There’s a little part of the art world not widely traveled offering a nuanced view of an artist’s oeuvre called Ephemera.| By definition, ephemera are “items designed to be useful or important for only a short time, especially pamphlets, notices, tickets, etc.” So, in the art market, this includes exhibition posters, announcements – usually postcards … Continue reading “Every Picture Tells A Story”
|The assertion that Miles Davis was a “musical chameleon” might best be demonstrated by listening to albums, Porgy and Bess and Aura, back-to-back. They are similar without being anything alike.| Recently grazing along a shelf with 41 CDs by Miles Davis (double-sets and boxed collections counting as one, and only part of my Davis collection) … Continue reading “Some Orchestral Miles Davis”
|True diversification should mean looking across everything we own and ensuring there is always something of value that can be monetized, regardless of the economic environment.| Investing is not a zero-sum game. It is also a fallacy that someone else must lose money for you to profit. All the talk about “beating” the averages serves … Continue reading “Diversify and Conquer”
|The most important takeaway from today’s musings is the importance of having a personal Investment Policy to help guide your asset acquisition activities.| About twenty-five years ago I wrote my first Investment Policy. The intention was to create a document that could help guide financial decision making knowing that my circumstances and goals would change … Continue reading “The Best Policy”
|Lary Bloom isn’t in the art business, he was a friend of LeWitt, and as such this biography is more about the man than his art.| There were several curious aspects to my purchase of an original pen and ink drawing by Sol LeWitt from his incomplete cube series. A work long coveted, when one … Continue reading “A Life of Ideas”
|Chick Corea was on my turntable decades before I knew who he was. Albums like The Leprechaun and Romantic Warrior have been staples of my jazz soundtrack since critical listening became a treasured habit.| A keyboard player who worked with all the greats and pretty much played it all, Corea has spent the last couple … Continue reading “Chick’s Tunes”
|Let’s take a more nuanced view and talk about individual stocks and not the markets since the word “average” doesn’t seem to apply right now.| Not much new here. Markets are more manic than normal, though these are hardly normal times. Investor sentiment by most measures remains skeptical and cautious. And yet day trading is … Continue reading “The Investor’s Edge”
As it tends to do in tumultuous times, gold is once again shining brightly. There was a sort-of Mea Culpa recently by one of my favorite financial authors, Jason Zweig, in the Wall Street Journal. Reflecting back on a comment made five years ago disparaging gold as an investment, he admits that the 10.5% annual … Continue reading “Don’t Let the Gold Bug Bite”
