Straight-Line Thinking
How to Keep a Crisis in Perspective: Know the Facts If you take the current pandemic news and extrapolate it on a straight-line basis, you could become very worried, very…
Why Operational Activism is Here to Stay
As indexed and passive investment funds continue to grow assets under their management, they frequently appear among the largest investors on a public company’s roster of owners. These investment vehicles…
Investors Seeking Appreciation Overlook Opportunity with Bonds
The subject of stocks vs bonds elicits diverse reactions from investment professionals. This article explores the unique opportunity in the bond market that may challenge previous notions. Investors have three…
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Bristow Exemplifies Broken Corporate Governance
In a June 28, 1927 letter to John D. Rockefeller Jr. and the finance committee of the Rockefeller foundation, a young Ben Graham opined, “The cash capital not needed by…
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Shareholders – Who Has the Power?
What options do you and other shareholders have to protect the value of a business in which you have invested when board governance and oversight of company management cause the…
Correlation: Does it Matter?
How much should you be concerned about the correlation of your stock’s price to some benchmark or index? Isn’t the goal of most investors to grow their capital at a…
The Folly of Earnings Forecasts
Can the future be predicted with any degree of certainty? Wall Street’s view of the longer future is notoriously fallible, and this necessarily applies to that important part of its…
When to Fire the Coach
What do Chuck Pagano, Ben McAdoo, John Fox and Jack Del Rio have in common? They no longer coach an NFL team. They also produced miserable results, which prompted their…
Active Management Versus Actively Managed
Advisors constantly debate passive versus active management styles. The passive camp argues that active managers fail to add value, so why pay the added fee? The active camp counters by…
Fear the Fed: QE to QT
This is a good time to review the Fed’s balance sheet, now that the Federal Reserve Board’s meeting is behind us and the interest rate debate accelerates. There have been…
The Active vs. Passive Investment Strategy Myth
A myth has become mainstream thinking right before our eyes. Financial professionals often state, “You can’t outperform the market, so don’t bother trying, simply index.” Index investing is by definition…
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Precision in an Imprecise World
Investors seek certainty, a desire to know what tomorrow holds. Discounting future earnings demands an element of predictability with cash-flows. In reality, there is no certainty of what tomorrow will…
When “Active” Investing Isn’t
Why Active Investors Achieve Only Benchmark Returns Wall Street “experts” would like you to think the era of superior stock selection is dead. How many times have you heard, “You…
Investment Success: Price Paid Matters Most
Most US equity market indices are again pushing toward record levels, warranting cautious optimism. Astute investors know all too well irrational exuberance often precedes market corrections and is the consequential…
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The Most Important Thing: Price Paid
Successful investing requires sound decision making based on judgment, experience, and knowledge. Once an investment decision has been made and capital committed, ongoing monitoring is necessary in order to adjust…
The Inevitable Market Correction
Market corrections are always hard on investor psyche. Investors must maintain a focus and understanding that corrections are a natural, inevitable, and unpredictable part of market cycles. The Dow Jones…
Too Much Diversification
Best Ideas Versus Overly Diversified Holding 20 issues in a portfolio is best practice. A typical stock fund holds more than 120 issuesThe issue is twofold: 1) too much money under management,…
Value Investing and Shareholder Activism
Milwaukee Private Wealth Management, Inc. (MWPMI) has made investments in companies of all sizes, across multiple industries and geographies using value oriented investment principles. We have found some companies to…