The Sizemore Investment Letter

“This book should not be controversial, but it will be,” writes Michael Dever in the introduction to Jackass Investing. “That is because investing, which should be a rational pursuit, is not… [M]ost people’s investment decisions are not based on rational facts. They’re based on myths and emotions.” Regrettably, Mr. Dever is correct in his assessment. [...]

The financial planning industry has no shortage of voices offering advice.  Unfortunately, they all tend to say the same thing, and it’s not what most investors need or want.  In fact, it’s often the exact opposite. Above all, most investors want security.  They want to know that the nest egg they’ve spent a lifetime building [...]

“Look around you. From now on, it gets worse. In ten years’ time, there will be no American Dream, any more than there’s a Greek or Portuguese Dream. In twenty, you’ll be living the American Nightmare, with large tracts of the country reduced to the favelas of Latin America, the rich fleeing for Bermuda…. “For [...]

In the new 2011 edition of his magnum opus Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor Dethroned, Australian economics professor Steve Keen comes out guns blazing, blasting the “Panglossian view” of neoclassical economics that did so much to get us into the credit boom and bust that we are still struggling to recover from. Keen, unlike most [...]

The art of investing is an exercise in making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. But today, it seems that the cloud of uncertainty is a little thicker than usual. During times like these, I like to do what your college professor might have called “cheating.” I like to look over the shoulders of other investors and see what they are doing.

For centuries the Islamic world dominated the West militarily, economically, and culturally.  As late as 1683, when Ottoman forces laid siege to Vienna, Muslim military domination was a legitimate fear for the Christian world. Excluding the sophisticated Byzantine Empire—which Muslim Arab forces nearly conquered and Muslim Turkish forces did conquer in 1453—and some of the [...]

Procrustes was a character from Greek mythology with an odd sense of hospitality. He would abduct travellers passing by his home, dine with them, and then invite them to spend the night in his guest bed. But being a bit of a perfectionist, he wanted them to fit in the bed just right. So those that were too tall for the bed had their legs chopped off; those that were too short were stretched.

Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity believed two dilapidated buildings in New York would be ideal shelters for the city’s homeless. The city actually agreed with them and offered to sell the building for one dollar each. Yet two years later, the shelter remained unfinished and Mother Teresa’s nuns gave up in despair. New York’s bureaucracy [...]

Long-time readers have heard me comment on the work of George Friedman, the founder of the Austin-based geopolitical forecasting firm Stratfor. I consider Friedman to be one of the insightful thinkers in the field today, and I wrote a lengthy, highly-complimentary review of his The Next 100 Years.Today, I’m going to take a look at [...]

There is a deep-seated belief in America that the United States is approaching the eve of its destruction. Read letters to the editor, peruse the Web, and listen to public discourse. Disastrous wars, uncontrolled deficits, high gasoline prices, shootings at universities, corruption in business and government, and an endless litany of other shortcomings—all of them [...]