Articles by Nick Massey

Here’s a friendly little quote from our friends at the United Nations. UN Chief Antonio Guterres said, “Extreme weather is becoming the new normal. All countries must respond and protect their people from the searing heat, fatal floods, storms, drought and raging fires that result.”

In the early days of my investment career, a senior trader told me something I never forgot. “How we think impacts our investment returns.” Some investors are rather surprised by this. They believe profits result from buying low and selling high. But it’s actually their thinking that determines whether prices are low or high. As the old trader told me: “Prices are numbers on a screen. They aren’t high or low. We trade trends, not price.”

You may not have heard of Edwin Drake, also known as Colonel Drake, but he was an American businessman in Pennsylvania and the first American to drill for oil successfully. He lived from 1819 to 1880, but his legacy has much to do with the high standard of living we all enjoy today.

It seems you can’t read an investment column or watch a business news story lately without hearing about AI (Artificial Intelligence). I’m certainly no expert on this topic, so I can write from the viewpoint of someone who knows little about this technology. But I do know a lot about the cycle that new life-changing technology goes through. Some people say AI is the greatest investment opportunity since the internet. That may well be true, but caution is warranted here.

To be a good long-term investor, you need a certain degree of optimism. Optimism is good, but sometimes you need a little near-term pessimism, or you can end up waiting a long time.

Are you as confused as most people with all the conflicting data and advice from economists and other forecasters? Who do you believe? On the one hand, this, on the other hand, that. Which is it? To paraphrase Harry Truman, “Somebody please find me a one-armed economist!”

It’s been said by some that, with chemotherapy, there is a fine line between killing the cancer and killing the patient. You could probably say the same about the Fed in their efforts to monitor banking institutions. As you probably know from some of my past columns, I’m not a big fan of the Federal Reserve. I haven’t gone on a good ole fashion rant in a while, so here goes.

Mark Twain is often credited with the famous line, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” It is a phrase describing the persuasive power of numbers, particularly the use of statistics to bolster weak arguments.

Over the last 15 years, I have written four different columns on the subject of the debt ceiling. Other than the numbers, nothing much has changed. Here we go again. This would all be quite humorous if it were not so serious.

On Oct. 28, 2007, I wrote a column titled, “The Downside of Protectionism.” “During the Roaring 20s, the world economy benefited from that great era of globalization and free trade. Then, as now, global trade made a lot of people uncomfortable. And in both cases, politicians responded to public sentiment in exactly the wrong way, by attempting to stop or slow foreign competition. There is some danger that they could do it again.”