Category: Blog

Thoroughly Stupid By Brad Thomason, CPA   Oscar Wilde’s character Lord Henry Wotten had this to say in The Picture of Dorian Gray: “Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.”   In October the Department of Labor issued new guidance for pension fund managers, addressing the matter […]

Digging into Inflation By Brad Thomason, CPA   Elsewhere I’ve written about the importance of accounting for inflation when doing long-term planning. In simplest terms, any plan which doesn’t acknowledge the change in a dollar’s purchasing power over long periods of time, is flawed. But what exactly is inflation? You would think that for something […]

Looking for the Next Big Thing By Brad Thomason, CPA   Everyone in the investing game wants to know what’s going to be gaining value in the weeks and months to come. A lot of time goes into trying to discern the answers. Yet some of the simplest clues are the ones that are the […]

The Value of Activity By Brad Thomason, CPA Dairy farmers in Belgium recently staged a protest to decry falling milk prices. Because of import bans in Russia (retaliation for the Ukraine/Crimea sanctions) and falling demand in China, EU exports are way down. Companies which supply oil field services in Texas and the Dakotas are going […]

Just Let it Ride (Really!?!?!) By Brad Thomason, CPA   The opening salvo in this week’s edition of Bloomberg BusinessWeek is a scolding piece aimed at investors who are pulling their money out of emerging markets, and in so doing exacerbating the drop in prices. The piece makes all the familiar arguments about why the […]

The News Theory of Market Behavior By: Brad Thomason, CPA   When the market drops (or goes up, for that matter) everyone wants to know what caused it. Which is a reasonable desire, as far as it goes. To cater to this desire, there are lots of news outlets that are devoted strictly to market […]

In the late 90s, financial writers fell all over themselves explaining how we had entered into a “new economy” in which blase factors like corporate profits no longer mattered.  No sir, not in the new economy.  It was all about users, and growth potential, and innovation (though innovation toward exactly what was never made clear).  […]

Conflicted Interests By Brad Thomason, CPA July 2, 2015 According to a recent survey published by Fortune magazine, 84% of big company executives say that their company would be easier to manage if it wasn’t public. To point out the obvious, that’s not a small majority. The ceremony associated with earnings guidance, analyst calls and […]

The Construction Cost Constraint By Brad Thomason, CPA June 23, 2015 Several of our firm’s larger clients are real estate investors and we’re involved with project management work for them on a nearly continual basis. As such, we spend an awful lot of time dealing with construction and related activities; far more so than you […]

When Uncomplicated Things are Made Complicated By Brad Thomason, CPA June 8th, 2015   You know those new drink dispensers that they have at some fast food places, the ones with a touch screen and a set of menus that you have to click through in order to gain access to dozens of drink options? […]