David BoothAuthor of Stay Calm Patient Trading in Life A while back, I took a friend on a tour of our global headquarters in Austin. As we walked the trading floor, my friend was struck by the state of calm he found there. Nobody was rushing or screaming. Nobody looked upset. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you might have thought not much was happening at all. But a lot was happening. These traders were doing something we’ve practiced since the very beginning: patient trading....
9 days ago • 6 min read
David BoothAuthor of Stay Calm A Great Way to Start Investing Public markets are one of humanity’s greatest innovations. I think we should celebrate them more. Over the past 100 years, the S&P 500 has returned about 10% a year on average, which means investors have basically been able to double their money every seven years.¹ Let’s say you have a 42-year time horizon, from when you start investing to when you plan to retire. That’s six separate periods of seven years. A hypothetical dollar...
23 days ago • 5 min read
David BoothAuthor of Stay Calm Exercise Judgment I went to work out one morning and saw that the market was down 2%. When I came back, the market was up 2%. So, what’s the investment lesson? Don’t forget to exercise! You want an investing plan that allows you to stay calm during mornings like that. You can’t control financial markets, but you can control how you react to them. Then you can focus on things that matter to you, like exercise for me. The market roller coaster is one of many...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
David BoothAuthor of Stay Calm Why I Wrote Stay Calm I grew up in Kansas with Depression-era parents, plainspoken people who never trusted investing in the stock market. In their minds, investing was for insiders. Not for people like them. When my dad passed away in 1985, my brother and sister and I went to his bank and opened the family safe deposit box. Inside was $15,000 in cash, more than 15% of everything my parents had. Dad grew up watching banks fail. He needed that cash where he could...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
David BoothAuthor of Stay Calm How Can We Make This Better? That simple question has sparked so much human ingenuity. And after more than 50 years of working in finance, I still think that question is one of the most powerful forces in investing. Right now, as you’re reading this, millions of people at thousands of companies around the world are trying to solve problems. Improving products. Figuring out how to do things better, faster, cheaper. Most of these inventors and entrepreneurs will...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
David BoothAuthor of Stay Calm 6 Essential Lessons for Tomorrow’s Business Leaders (That They Don’t Teach in MBA Programs) In the late 1970s, I was working at the pension consulting firm A.G. Becker and was frustrated with my role. The firm seemed mired in inefficiency. One night, I called my mentor, John “Mac” McQuown, to vent. Instead of offering sympathy, Mac asked me a question that stopped me in my tracks: “Are you disappointed in them, or are you disappointed in yourself?” Mac was...
2 months ago • 6 min read
David BoothAuthor of Stay Calm Why Aren’t the Markets Going Even More Crazy? I was recently talking with a friend about the conflict in the Middle East, and she asked, “Why aren’t the markets going even more crazy?” Specific circumstances aside, this is a question I’ve heard many times over my 50+ years in finance. I’ve given a version of the same answer over and over again, and I’ve come to believe it more each time the market has processed and moved through a new event. I told my friend...
3 months ago • 5 min read
David BoothAuthor of Stay Calm What Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gene Fama Have in Common One of the better things about getting older is that you get to look back on the people who’ve shaped your life. For me, two people keep coming to mind, and I’ll admit seeing their names next to one another makes me chuckle: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gene Fama. Between the three of us, we have a dozen bodybuilding championships and a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. They couldn’t look more different. One...
3 months ago • 6 min read
David BoothAuthor of Stay Calm You Know More About Investing Than You Think You Do April is Financial Literacy Month, which seems like a good time to remind people that you don’t need to be an expert to invest well. No matter how familiar we are with investing, we’ve all navigated uncertainty, weighed risks and rewards, and made carefully considered tradeoff decisions. Just by being human, we’ve been compelled to tackle the central challenges of life—which also happen to be the central...
4 months ago • 9 min read