Mickey Kim

In difficult times, the hardest thing for long-term investors to do is to do nothing.

Candidates love to hand out “goodies” like tax reductions and tinker with the economy to curry favor with voters.

As the partisan storm increases in intensity, you might be tempted to make changes to your portfolio because of how you believe a short-term event like an election will impact the financial markets.

The challenge is determining an “appropriate,” or responsible, level of debt or leverage.

In a famous exchange from Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” one friend asks, “How did you go bankrupt?” To which the friend replies, “Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.”

Risk is the permanent loss of capital invested or loss of purchasing power from inflation.

As the partisan storm increases in intensity over the coming months, you might be tempted to make changes to your portfolio because of how you believe a short-term event like an election will impact the financial markets. Don’t.

Outcome is the result, but it doesn’t tell you anything about how that result was achieved. Outcome is about the “right now.”

I’m always amazed and awed to read about “salt-of-the-earth” people like Holt who are of modest means but still manage to amass multimillion-dollar estates.

The investors’ mantra to “buy low, sell high” seems both simple and easy, but unfortunately, we humans are hard-wired to do just the opposite, and our bad habits of “chasing performance” and trying to “time the market” cause us financial harm.

Taking a walk down “Memory Lane” sometimes brings back painful memories but can also reinforce important lessons.