Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for May 18, 2023

Take Alice’s advice.

There’s no guarantee the one account beating the market won’t underperform next year.

Wall Street is a colossal crap-shoot!!

Alice doesn’t need all the money now. So she puts some in a low cost S&P fund, and puts the rest in a laddered set of Treasuries, so some will expire every year going forward to pay her living expenses for that year. Alice has it all worked out. She just needs an address to get her statements.

Eventually Jan will understand what Alice just taught her.

Assuming the standard bell curve of statistics, there will always be outliers who are going to be either considerably better, or considerably worse, than the average.

It might be down to good management, but it might just be down to luck, but the way the statistic is presented here, managed portfolios are an exercise in scraping fees from suckers who get a worse return in the bargain.

As @GabryelFrost said 2 days ago, poor does not mean stupid. Alice is not only brilliant but is a genius for illustrating her point. Joanie should be thankful she is not opposing Alice in court!

I’m waiting for a laugh here.

What is timely about this theme is the huge number of money managers flowing out of our colleges and universities. Someone needs to point out that if no one is earning any money, there is no money to manage.

Does anyone else think Trudeau was burned by a money manager? :/

Alice is smarter than she looks.

This client is pretty smart- clearly lives below her means…

When Madoff was running his pyramid, someone said ‘’he makes a profit every month, that’s impossible’’ and that’s what collapsed the scheme.

Being right all the time is such a burden. How does Alice handle the strain?

The George Santos matter has been referred back to The House Ethics Committee.

To quote Zonker Harris—-“Oh,wow!! Miscreants look out,huh?”

That’s why they call them brokers. If they made you money, they would be called richers.

Given that this story arc was first published in 1998 it sure is interesting how relevant it still is.

I wonder how Alice feels about that fruit company that Forest Gump was invested in?

One question though.

If Alice is such a mega financial manager, how come she’s living on a park bench? ;-)

…. mic drop…..

Perhaps a nice a home, a savings account and some savings bonds?

Speculation on companies you know nothing about is strictly gambling. In a world of reasonable trading, “outsider trading” would be non-existent. :)

Sound investment advice, which works because very few follow it, I suppose.

Alice knows her probability…

Who has coins in their pocket anymore?

Alice sounds smarter than maybe 99.99% of investors.

The trick to sound investing is entirely in having rare insight not into the market conditions of the current day but of what they will be 5-10-20 years down the road, which is why my retirement income has been successfully insured by my investments in DeLorean, 8-track tapes, and MySpace.

Alice may be old and soon not to be homeless, but she is one savvy person.

This arc is just doing a beautiful job of nailing the financial advice industry. She’s got it down to a T.

One thing a huge majority of people do not understand is statistics. I woke up thinking about averages yesterday morning, so was amused to see this this morning. People misinterpret average as the median – for example, from knowing an average, one cannot say that 50% fall below it – but one sees that kind of statement all of the time. Ditto for the market – what can one really tell from an average, especially when the data can be so volatile? And the point made in this comic is very clear.

This just in from the ACLU:

This morning – in a win for free expression on the internet – the Supreme Court unanimously protected our right to free speech on online platforms in two key rulings.

Here’s what to know about both:

→ In Twitter v. Taamneh: The Court ruled that when companies like Twitter, Google, and Facebook simply provide a platform that’s open to anyone for speech purposes, that isn’t enough to “aid and abet” an act of terrorism under the Anti-Terrorism Act.

→ In Gonzalez v. Google: SCOTUS sent the case back to the court of appeals, leaving in place the vital protections for free speech afforded by Section 230. Under Section 230, platforms generally won’t be held liable for user-posted content, removing incentives to limit what we say online.

Got me to thinking.. what would I do with Alice’s cash., folks need soap, Proctor & Gamble sold soap for over a century and a half at current interest dividend yield 2.58% average for a yearly payout of $48,860 from the 1.7 mil., forever.

She should have her bite the coin instead. Then she should invest in bit coin.