Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

I often refer to the above quote by the famous investor Sir John Templeton to explain what is currently going on in marketplaces. Not a single day goes by that I am not confronted by the question from clients regarding the ever-advancing stock markets. It seems that everyone would like to project the decline in…

Hopefully, Charles Dickens will forgive my use above of his famous quote from A Tale of Two Cities, although written in 1859 it seems to readily apply to today’s feeling in the U.S. As we move quickly into the, supposedly, “merry” holiday season, I began wondering why so many people have such a bad attitude…

The month of July 2020 will clearly be one to look back on in financial history as an important month. After an avalanche of negative publicity regarding the economy and the prospects for the U.S. to pull out of the pandemic, the economy continued to strengthen and the stock market reflected that strength. It has…

I would be lying to you if I did not emphasize how difficult the first six months were on the Stock Market. We have been overwhelmed with bad information and exclamations of concern regarding the pandemic and there seems to be a real shortage of people who look at the real numbers. In the midst…

I will be the first to admit that the last several months have been trying, not only in my industry, but for all of America. As we read the sobering statistics of the unemployed and think about their plight, we notice that the stock market is rallying, which seems to be a huge conundrum. I…

I walked down to my mailbox this Sunday morning and things seemed perfectly normal. I could actually write my name on my car due to the heavy pollen. It is a passage of spring in Atlanta to have the yellow pollen all over everything outside. It doesn’t do much for your sinuses, but it does…

A funny thing happened during the month of February that no one could have forecasted. In the middle of February, we hit all-time highs on the major market indexes. After enjoying a 31% gain in 2019, you would certainly expect some sort of pullback, but the fact that in the first 6 weeks of the…

We are closing in on the end of one of the best investment years of the decade. We are now enjoying one of the best economies of all time in the U.S. with unemployment at a 50-year low. We have seen the GDP in the United States hold up and more Americans are working now…

The month of October 2019 turned out to be quite an extraordinarily good month for investors. Even though the “news of the day” was, in a word, discouraging, the economy and the financial markets continue to move higher. I am sure that the impact of all the negative news and political strife we find ourselves…

Since there was not a whole lot of news in the financial markets during the month of August, I thought I would tell you about the time I received a standing ovation at Vanderbilt University. I will not share the details yet, rather just force you to read all of this other important information before…