“Don’t fight the tape” is one of those old Wall Street adages that shows up in different permutations and derivations when you read financial commentary. Humphrey Neill once said “Don’t follow the crowd, learn the tape!” Ace Greenburg once advised investors to sell any stock that goes down five days in a row. Yale Hirsch told investors to buy their stocks on Monday and sell them on Friday. Heck, even one of my investing heroes Benjamin Graham once said something along these lines when he advised to “never buy a stock right immediately after a substantial rise or sell after a substantial fall.”

There is a fundamental problem with all of these pieces of advice that should be apparent to anyone with a long-term business owner’s mentality in their approach to stockpicking: none of these quotes have anything to do with valuation. They speak solely in terms of price performance, … Read the rest of this article!

Investment forecasts are notoriously inaccurate. A 2018 study by Morningstar indicated that 87% of consensus views for the five-year earnings per share growth rate for a particular company get the forecasts wrong by an amount greater than 5% annualized. Only 4% of analysts offer predictions of expected stock prices five years down the road within 20% of the figure’s accuracy.

That is well and good, but still, you have to do something intelligent with your surplus, so how should you move forward knowing that most predictions about the future are not particularly sturdy?

My thoughts on mitigating the uncertainty that surrounds any potential investment that you may make:

Try to arrange your affairs so that even if the future performance for a stock underperforms, you’ve locked in your riches on the buy side.

In my own experience, I remember purchasing shares of BP after the oil spill when the price … Read the rest of this article!