Dive into the archives.
- The Financial Psychology of Everyday Life
All of us responsible for steering families and loved ones through the increasing tangle of income, saving, and investment, should take a look at Mohammed El-Erian’s “Comfy old ways will not see us through” in today’s FT. He reminds us that we operate with incomplete and wrongly-framed valuation models which themselves focus on growth expectations [...]
- Learning From Cases: 2. The Adrenaline Rush of Manic Trading
Twitter has begun to serve the social function of anchoring day traders to one another in a virtual community. Checking in on one another’s picks and strategies, supporting one another’s creative trading approaches, the positive takeaway is that a lonely and isolating occupation has developed a communicative outlet. The downside is that as with drinking, [...]
- Learning From Cases: 1. Emotional Learning as Value
Recent consultations with clients have converged in an exciting empirical finding. Focusing upon significant emotional and vocational transitions at midlife, we have often inventoried both material assets and knowledge assets at different life stages. With the financial markets bubbling up 50% above their recent lows, clients seemed curious about looking back over adulthood and quantifying [...]
- Happy Days R Here Again
Clearly, I was misinformed. I grew up on stories of the Great Depression: was formed by my parents’ memories of sufferings endured or imagined. My great-grandfather… who’d weathered the Russo-Japanese War and had cannily utilized his war-record after the Kishiniev Pogroms to purchase property formerly proscribed to Jews— just so he could embed his young [...]
- Spinning the Wheel Faster
It is official. Deloitte reports that the return on assets at US companies has been in free-fall since 1965. Competition has tightened margins. Both consumers and valued employees have benefited as prices have dropped and salaries have increased. And the counterweight to the bottom line problem (at least at banks) has been increasing leverage. Leverage [...]
- Behavioral Finance: Happy Days Are Here Again
Behavioral finance begins with the setting of a question. For the individual investor, the question might be put, “what is going on in the market that is out of synch with fundamentals of reality?” For the market maker, wishing to influence market participants, the same question may be addressed— though acted upon to different ends. [...]
- Introducing the NYC Cooperative Building as a Multi-Family Business
The New York City Cooperative is a multi-family business. Assets from multiple families are invested into shares, bought and sold in a competitive market, and allocated for shareholder use, into discrete apartment units, represented by share holdings of varied size. The purpose of the Cooperative is to furnish a home for its shareholders. Secondarily, it [...]
- The Business of Family
Awash in information, we scan the headlines continuously, adjusting our ongoing visions of externalities upon which we depend: politics, economics, and shifts in the markets. We trust the fine attunement of our filtering capabilities to deliver a unified picture of the front pages we consume from multiple sources- sometimes print, sometimes tv, increasingly internet. Our [...]
- Family Business: Opportunity Lost in a Daughter’s Recognition of Dad’s Grumpiness
“Gosh, you’re grumpy today,” I heard, as I parked the car. It hadn’t been addressed to me, but to the man in the car beside me, by his adolescent daughter. Though not feeling particularly grumpy myself, her comment got me thinking. Everyone experiences moods. Some, more frequently and more intensely than others. Everyone experiences moments [...]
- The Ghost of a Former Family Business
Business developments expand and contract in harmony with economic developments. From this vantage, the current recession might be likened not so much to the Great Depression, but to more generalized periods of economic contraction. Yet, just as the ghost of the Great Depression has become a media favorite with which all of us must now [...]
