January Market Commentary: Are You A Pessimist or an Optimist?

If you know a pessimist when it comes to the markets, you have to get them to watch this Market Commentary. Hopefully, it will change the way they invest.
Why? Because we talk about wise investing for the long term and how there is almost no time in history when optimism hasn’t won out.
I’ll also talk about performance. Usually in our Market Commentaries we are focused on the prior month and discussing performance.
This time around however, we’re looking at 2016. Wow. What a year. So many excellent lessons epitomized by this past year.
Finally, we talk about your money and how you should have it managed with us, or someone with a philosophy like ours. We have a process based on probabilities that will optimize your chance at success and minimize your likelihood of failure.
So many people I talk to simply have a terrible plan in place that reduces their chances of success. I want to help anyone in that situation. So watch and then let’s talk.

What We’re Reading

Michael Lewis says this book is the best ever written on stock trading. This is a fantastic book! If you’re a trader, then you MUST read it.
Why I Don’t Focus on the Overall Market. The idea of building a portfolio with 5 – 8 great businesses is obviously something we agree with. Chris Mayer has a similar thought process that we do. You’re not just buying stocks, you’re buying businesses. Scale down the number of stocks that you buy and only buy the best.
10 Things You Can’t Learn from a Backtest. A large number of our newsletter subscribers are traders. Out of those many have done or at least thought of doing a backtest to see the results of a particular investing “system.” This article points out the problems with a “backtest.”