Author: Yuval Taylor

This piece attempts to encapsulate my conclusions after several years of investigating stock-market conundrums. It is, in essence, a grand unified theory of stock market investing. It is in ten succinct points. After laying out each point, I will offer some further thoughts and elucidations, and link to my previous…

Not many of us have an overarching theory that guides us in our approach to picking winning stocks. But I think one could classify most stock pickers into one of three types. In this article, I’m going to present these types by creating a conversation between three imaginary investors whose…

Whether you hold only stocks or a wide variety of assets, a question you’ll be forced to face sooner or later is whether you should rebalance to a specific preset weight periodically or just let some positions get bigger and others smaller. This article aims to help you make that…

It is commonly believed that you cannot have more reward without taking on more risk. I take a different view. You certainly can have more reward by taking on less risk, simply by switching from highly risky investments to more dependable ones. By evaluating every investment from as many angles…

At some point, I am going to retire, so I wanted to calculate how much of my portfolio I should put into cash in order to protect myself against sequence-of-returns risk. If you’re withdrawing monthly from a portfolio that’s partially invested in equities and a bear market comes along, you’ll…

A “tenbagger” is a stock in which you make ten times your initial investment. As Peter Lynch wrote in One Up on Wall Street, “a tenbagger is the fiscal equivalent of two home runs and a double.” Of course, it could take a long time to make back ten times…

I If you read enough about algorithms and backtesting, you come across story after story of false positives, or type I errors. A backtest shows that such-and-such a factor or strategy will produce outsize returns, and then, when people actually invest real money in it, the returns are dismal. People…

I use an evaluation system to rank stocks (I’ve written about it extensively here and here and here). But sometimes I get highly ranked stocks on my list that I really don’t want to buy. I won’t name any names here, but one company that was ranked number one or…

Tamara buys a stock market index (VTI) and reinvests her dividends. She doesn’t use leverage. She began investing exactly ten years ago, and has made 178% on her investments, for an annualized return of 10.76%. Her initial $100,000 investment is now worth $278,000. Jessika buys the same stock market index…

Last May, Kit Chellel wrote a very interesting article for Bloomberg News about Bill Benter, who won $900 million betting on horse races. The races he bet on were run on a parimutuel system, where odds are updated in proportion to how bettors bet, with the house simply skimming a…