Financially Speaking

“The longer that I’m in this business, I’m just kind of wondering if money is not in the Math department but it’s in the Psychology department.”

“The support in the market is just growing confidence in the economy’s resilience. I think investors may be concluding that the economy has actually avoided a recession – which is a position that we’ve taken for quite some time.”

“Consequently, the forecasts of the Social Security trust fund solvency are just moot. We might as well be monitoring the health of Thor or Godzilla or the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.”

“And after a dismal, dismal year last year; three quarters of negative losses – there’s a ray of hope. After I reviewed your portfolios, we saw returns for the fourth quarter that were positive 5 to 10%. Maybe that’s just the beginning of the turn. I don’t know. We don’t know about these things. But what I do know is that we’ve had recessions, we’ve endured recessions, we recover from recessions, we reaccumulate the lost wealth we have from recessions and I expect this to be exactly the same situation.” – BARRY M. CORKERN

“My first ski trip just reminds me of the stock market and the financial markets for this year. It’s just been daunting. Ups and downs throughout the year.”

BARRY M. CORKERN

“So, I went back and made the calculations, and the return on stocks from February the 1st of 2020 (just days before the pandemic started) to the end of this dismal September (a few weeks ago)…stocks were up a total of 14%. Yes, in spite of all of that – stocks are still up. – BARRY M. CORKERN

“Part of what makes bear markets so unbearable is that no one, absolutely nobody, knows when they’re going to end. But, that doesn’t keep the talking heads on financial news from telling, explaining, exhorting: measures, hunches, folklore; purporting when stocks will finally stop falling. – BARRY M. CORKERN

“Sometimes it takes awhile to wade through all of the financial information, to get a grasp of what is going on. The past four months has been one of those times; an extraordinary time.” – BARRY M. CORKERN

“I think eventually the market will kind of focus on where we are with the economy. We've got good numbers this week. We're going to see the Fed...

“In the 1980s we saw the emergence of behavioral economics. This body of research was conducted by psychiatrists and economists. It's really good...