TheStreet: Why You'll Actually Be Richer When the Dollar is Worth Less

By SIMON CONSTABLE

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The great thing about pain is that the moment it stops, you feel better. And the agony the strong dollarinflicted on stocks -- and consequently, your portfolio -- may soon be over.

The U.S. Dollar Index, which measures the greenback against major world currencies, surged 22% from July 2014 through mid-March, according to data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve. It stalled then, however, and has moved in a mostly sideways range since.

Read more here.

TheStreet: 3 Reasons to Be Bullish on the U.S. Economy -- And 3 More Not to Be

By SIMON CONSTABLE

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The state of the U.S. economy is almost Dickensian: It's the best of times and the worst of times. There are reasons to be bullish as well as reasons to be bearish.

First, the good news:

Read more here.

OZY: The Fed And The Cost Of Your New Home

By SIMON CONSTABLE

For weeks we held our breath — at least those of us a little on the nerdy side did. And even if we weren’t quite so engrossed with the economy, we knew that the Federal Reserve’s decision on whether to raise interest rates was kind of important. After all, it hadn’t happened since Barry Bonds (remember him?) was still a big star.

Yep, economists, bankers and stockbrokers were in suspense over the Fed’s next step — and last week, we learned it was sitting pat. But if you’re about to click to another story, figuring this is a Wall Street type of thing, affecting only high finance, let us inform you that the news hits you right in the comfort of your own living room — namely, by impacting how much it’ll cost you to borrow money.

Read more here.

WSJ: Financial Adviser or Financial Planner?

By SIMON CONSTABLE

What can you expect from a financial adviser? Is it different from what you’ll get from a financial planner?When it comes to financial advice, labels can be deceiving.

Some advisers might offer as much guidance as some planners—and in some cases both might provide less help than those titles imply. The important thing for investors is to look beyond the labels to see exactly what they are being offered. Read more here.

WSJ: Everybody Knows Men Take More Investing Risks Than Women. Is It True?

By SIMON CONSTABLE

The conventional wisdom is that when it comes to investing, women take fewer risks than men. Julie Nelson, professor of economics at University of Massachusetts in Boston, says the conventional wisdom is wrong. 

Ms. Nelson recently published peer-reviewed research that concludes not only that the appetite of men and women for financial risk is largely the same, but that much of the earlier data suggesting there were such differences has been misinterpreted. Read more here.

Forbes: How the Fed Lost Its Cred.

By Simon Constable

The Federal Reserve bottled out Thursday when it decided not to raise the short term cost of borrowing money. It’s unfortunate, because the lack of action now removes any semblance of a fig leaf it could hide behind and still claim credibility.

“Clearly, the FED does not even think it knows what it is doing,” writes Woody Dorsey of Market Semiotics. That seems to sum it up in a nutshell. But let me breakdown some of the details of exactly  how the century old institution became a joke.

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Forbes: Boy Battles Stigma And Depression With Book

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Years ago when I worked on Wall Street, the employee benefits manager once told me that 30% of the bank’s staff in the United States were prescribed Prozac. It is perhaps the most famous antidepressant medication in the world. But it is just one of a multitude of similar drugs that are used to treat mental illness.

I didn’t ask that manager for details, but my guess is that many more than three in 10 of the employees were medicated with antidepressants. At the time I saw it as sign that the stresses of that workplace were affecting a vast portion of people. It is true that such stress, like that found in the high pressure jobs of investment banking, can trigger such things. But it’s also a fact that depression can arrive without apparent reason or cause. It can even afflict the young, such as 21-year-old comedian Kevin Breel.

His book, Boy Meets Depression: Or Life Sucks and Then You Live, was published Tuesday.

Read more here.

OZY: Our Real Inflation Problem

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Despite these shaky stock markets, some of us are still angling for a shiny new ride — complete with that leather-laden new-car smell. But while you may hear news on the way to the dealership that inflation is still under control, you won’t believe it once a sales rep tells you their full-size American cars will cost you the better part of $40,000.

How can this be, when inflation is supposed to be muted? 

Read more here.

Forbes: Leadership Lessons From The Queen

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Earlier this week Her Majesty the Queen became Britain’s longest reigning monarch. Whether or not you support a monarchy there are things to learn from her, especially if you are in a leadership position.

Since becoming Queen in 1952 at the tender age of 25 she has dedicated her life to serving the people of Britain and the commonwealth. It’s not about her, it’s about what she can do for her people. Read more here.

National Archives and Records Administration , 

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Forbes: New York $15 Minimum Wage Plan Is Cuomo-omics

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Bad news for everyone who supports free market economics in New York State.

On Thursday New York Governor Andrew Cuomo approved plans for a $15 an hour minimum wage for all the state’s fast food workers. Specifically, it’s for those at large chains, at least for now. But he also says that $15 rate should be the minimum for all workers, state-wide. Unfortunately, he’s wrong.

Here’s why Cuomo-omics makes no sense.

TheStreet: The 1.9 Million Reasons To Eat Out

By SIMON CONSTABLE

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Saving a few extra bucks a month might make sense individually, but when everyone penny-pinches together, the consequences can be catastrophic.

How bad?  As many as one in three of the jobs lost in the Great Recession and its aftermath could have been caused by such collective consumer frugality. That's up to 1.85 million more job losses than there would have been otherwise. 

The statistics are examined in a new working paper titled Trading Down and the Business Cycle, published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The paper states that between 22% and 36% of the jobs lost were because of consumers "trading down," or buying lower quality products and services.

Read more here.

OZY: A Worst-Case Scenario for Stocks — It's Ugly

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Oh, how it hurts to see, U.S. stocks slowly (and sometimes not so slowly) sinking in recent weeks like so many Titanics. And yet, it could be worse. A lot worse. The 2008 financial crisis is the kind of thing you want to just shut out from your mind, a time when the only option seemed to be gallows humor. (The best joke: How your 401(k) retirement, now worth half its value, was only a “201(k)” plan.) Nobody, at least nobody who really understood money, wanted to look at their monthly financial statements. Doing so left a sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach.

Thank goodness we’re not living through that again! Or could we be? Fair warning, what some smart observers think may not exactly make your day.

Read more here.

TheStreet: Dumping Energy Stocks Might Cost Harvard $100 Million a Year

By SIMON CONSTABLE

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Harvard's $32.7 billion endowment would generate significantly lower returns if climate-change activists convince the university to abandon fossil fuel investments, according to a new study.

Such a strategy might cost more than $100 million a year, according to the report, which was commissioned and financed by the Independent Petroleum Association of America. It examines the effects of divestment on five universities with large endowments and indicates cutting out those stocks would have "material impacts" on the ability of the portfolios to meet schools' funding goals. Read more here.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

WSJ: What Is Tail Risk?

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Bank research reports frequently refer to “tail risk” for investors, but it isn’t always clear what it means and what to do about it.

Broadly speaking, a tail risk is an event with a small probability of happening, says Bob Conroy, professor of finance at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. “In every event there are tails; there are really, really good things that can happen and really, really bad things.”

The term comes from looking at the bell curve, or so-called normal distribution of results. The tails of the bell curve extend out to plus or minus infinity with ever-decreasing probabilities. Read more here.

WSJ: In Chaos, Small Hedge Funds Do Better

By SIMON CONSTABLE

The moment a crisis breaks out, hedge-fund investors should pray they’re in a large fund, which has the capital and market influence to survive, right? 

Just the opposite, it appears.  Read more here.

Forbes: An Antidote To The Tiger Mom? -- Book

By SIMON CONSTABLE

There is something about the sting of asphalt on the palm of your hand when you fall off your bicycle that makes you never want to let it happen again. Of course it will happen again, but you learn, you get better and so on. That is the way millions of people learned to ride. At least they did. But not so much lately.

A couple of years ago I met a woman who had never fallen from a bicycle or seemingly had any major failure in her life. Unfortunately, she wanted me to write her life story. It was unfortunate because narrative’s with no struggle don’t work so well. Obstacles overcome, after all, make a better tale. The bigger the obstacle the better the story. A story without such tension is just lacking. And now we are learning that it doesn’t really work so well in life either.

That brings me to Jessica Lahey’s recently published book, “The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed,” which addresses the issue of over protective parenting and how sometimes it’s just a better gift to let kids learn through trial and error. Lot’s of emphasis on the error, please! Read more here.

TheStreet: You Need Nerves of Steel to Make Money in the Metal Market

By SIMON CONSTABLE

NEW YORK (TheStreet)-- Steel stocks may shine soon, after losing their luster during a brutal summer, but only investors with an appetite for turbulence should consider buying them.

What makes them attractive is the relatively low prices. The Market Vectors Steel  exchange-traded fund, which holds a basket of steel stocks and iron-ore producers, is down 25% over the three months through Thursday, more than three times as much as the Standard & Poor's 500 index. U.S. Steel fared even worse, falling more than 35% over the same period. Read more here.

TheStreet: How to Make Your Big Idea the Next Facebook: Take a Break

By SIMON CONSTABLE

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- If you want to create the next disruptive technology, it's going to take much more than a flash of inspiration during your morning shower: One vital ingredient is slack time.

Why? Because then you'll have time to do all the boring administrative work that's necessary for success. Nobody said building the next Facebook, Uber or Apple would be all glamour.

Read more here.

OZY: What Our Unemployment Rate Really Means

By SIMON CONSTABLE

Like lucky lottery numbers, few figures get as closely scrutinized every month as America’s unemployment rate. Now hovering at just 5.3 percent, down from 6.2 percent a year ago and close to half what it was five years ago, things seem to be on the up-and-up in the job market, right?

Well, turn to an elderly loved one, sitting back in a big comfy armchair sipping a mint julep, and they’ll probably tell you things just aren’t what they used to be. And they’d be right. Read more here.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Forbes: Why Apple Should Steer Clear Of The Car Biz

By SIMON CONSTABLE

This is an open letter to the management of Apple.

Dear All,

If you are considering entering the car business, please reconsider. This is not something you should undertake likely. Trust me, I know from experience. I worked for years with General Motors and its subsidiary Delphi. Yes, the tech industry is brutal, but the auto business has other issues. Here are just some of the things you need to know: Read more here.

Photo by Sumudu Mohottige on Unsplash