Momentum investing, as practiced by retail investors following CNBC trends rather than systematic lookback strategies, leads to losses because investors focus on what to buy but forget the critical skill of knowing when to sell, resulting in a Wile E. Coyote cliff-fall dynamic.

Jack Bogle, though a hero and founder of modern passive investing, never specified which index to buy or when—a critical omission—because buying the NASDAQ at the peak took 14 years to break even, while buying emerging markets or energy during that period would have been fantastic, and buying the S&P 500 produced negative returns for a decade.

The risk of U.S. government debt is not a sudden day of reckoning where investors flee overnight, but rather a slow bleed that has already been underway for 10 to 15 years, manifested as a growing risk premium on Treasury yields relative to other AAA-rated sovereign debt.

RBA and other investors think like investors, not economists: whereas economists compare the U.S. and European economies abstractly, investors ask what drives returns in each stock market—and the key difference is that Europe lacks a significant tech sector, making valuations look similar when compared on an ex-tech basis.

Investing in an S&P 500 index fund or growth index fund is a colossal mistake during periods of narrow market concentration because those index funds are dominated by the seven to ten largest companies, which may not perform well given the abundance of growth opportunities in a much broader universe globally.

Deglobalization is inherently inflationary because globalization was inherently disinflationary by increasing competition, and deglobalization reduces competition, putting upward pressure on prices.

The Federal Reserve's 2% inflation target seems antiquated given deglobalization trends, and a more reasonable secular inflation outlook would be 3 to 4 percent.

There is nothing good to say about U.S. debt-to-GDP ratios and debt levels; high leverage at the government level mirrors the hazards seen historically with overleveraged hedge funds and Korean companies in the 1990s, which led to tremendous earnings volatility.

The Fed is a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator: it observes data (growth, inflation), analyzes it, and then reacts to it, so investors cannot treat Fed policy as an initiator of markets but rather as a reactor to observable economic changes, making Fed-dependent trading less reliable for portfolio construction.

The Fed now faces a genuine dual mandate dilemma for the first time in decades: tariffs may weaken the consumer, but inflation expectations are rising, forcing the Fed to choose between saving the consumer through stimulus (risking inflation) or fighting inflation (risking recession), a trade-off that was obscured for years when disinflationary forces made both goals compatible.

Building wealth is not difficult; it is simple and well-understood (diversification, dividend compounding), but investors fail to build wealth because they chase a perpetual siren song of something new, better, and sexier, causing them to crash on the rocks like Odysseus's crew.

Individual investors should keep to the straight and narrow in core portfolios with only a small speculative allocation for riskier plays, rejecting the false promise of get-rich-quick schemes which never work.

The title of Bernstein's book from 25 years ago, 'Navigate the Noise: Investing in the New Age of Media and Hype,' remains more relevant today than when written, suggesting that the investor challenge of distinguishing signal from noise in an age of constant media chatter is perpetual and self-renewing.

Leading indicators, coincident indicators, and lagging indicators represent a classification of economic data based on their timing relative to GDP, with leading indicators predictive but imperfect, lagging indicators definitionally reactive, and most investor focus misallocated to lagging indicators.

Investors irrationally focus on lagging indicators like CPI and unemployment despite their backward-looking nature, likely because they are the most publicized and easily understood metrics rather than because they are predictive.

The 2024 stock market was the most narrow stock market seen since the Great Depression, with dominance concentrated in seven to ten companies (Magnificent Seven), which represents a pessimistic view of future growth prospects because such concentration only makes economic sense during depressions when survival, not growth, is the focus.

If technology falls out of favor or enters a secular downturn, other sectors of the U.S. economy and global economy may perform better, making diversification across international and non-tech stocks a prudent hedge to Mag 7 dominance.

The US debt penalty has been disguised from public awareness because absolute interest rates have remained low, so investors didn't notice they were being penalized with a risk premium relative to what rates should have been for a riskless borrower.

The United States has lost up to 90% of its textile manufacturing capacity over the last 30 years, meaning tariffs on clothing (15-125%) will force consumers to either go without or pay significantly higher prices because there is no domestic substitute capacity.