Play to win. Repeat. Everybody likes to win. It is in our nature. The rush caused by winning is prodigious, especially if the winnings are significant. We either win due to luck or skill, or a combination of the two. Usually, when skills are equal amongst players, luck plays the deciding factor. Winning by sheer luck is satisfactory but poses an immediate challenge to the winner: “Can I repeat my win? Is this possible?”. Winning because of skill is much …

Celine Herault When we encounter crises like the current one induced by Covid-19, we all look for past reference points as they provide strong guidance as to what may or may not occur. This crisis is unprecedented in many ways and no single past event will allow us to predict what lies ahead. However, when it comes to market timing, we think that the above graph of the Dow Jones index during the 1929-1932 bear market, is humbling and a …

It’s not business; it is personal First and foremost, a shout out to all the sung and unsung heroes fighting an enemy that concerns all of us. We know that, statistically, heroes always rise to a challenge but we don’t always know who and where you are. You make all of us look better and you have our respect and support. During the first quarter of 2020, we were able to limit our clients’ losses between -3.9% and -11.8% (depending …

It is a windy and cold day in New York City and I am driving my cool new electric car down Broadway towards the downtown offices of J.P. Morgan where I have a meeting to discuss Investment Trust Funds, an investment vehicle that has become so popular that Goldman Sachs & Co launched a separate company, the Goldman Sachs Trading Corp, to sell an unprecedented amount of Investment Trust shares to the public. Never mind most of them are sold …

Serengeti, located in Tanzania, Africa, bordering Kenya, is a place of unparalleled beauty. Abundant wildlife lives in one of the most productive ecosystems on earth and it is one of only two locations where hominid fossils, estimated to be more than 2 million years old, have been found, pointing to our very early beginnings as human sapiens. Some roving descendants of those early hominids made it through Asia, over the (frozen) Bering Straight into Silicon Valley, North America and onwards: an unbelievable …

The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one. Yes, this amounts to something like 100 billion people against 7.5 billion. And yet, we ignore the accumulated experience of such a large majority of humanity at our own peril. Since the development of the spoken word, the invention of the printing machine and “lately” of the Internet, you could argue that there is no excuse for large mistakes to be repeated because they are all “recorded” and their lessons “available”. Therefore, …