While airplanes themselves and the flight systems that the airlines use to ferry us around the country and around the world are some of the most complicated systems humans have devised, perhaps there are lessons we can learn in dealing with other less complicated systems from their travails.  One commentator on Boeing’s maneuvering control system failure simply states that manufacturers and regulators need to recognize that “many current pilots are simply not up to the standard necessary to operate current systems”.[1] 

Investors like data and particularly the predictability of data. In fundamental investment analysis, company and economic data are the signal that is useful for modeling future expected economic growth rates, revenue, earnings, cash flows, etc. We use these to determine future values that can be discounted back to a fair value today. This helps us decide if something is currently cheap or expensive relative to future expectations, and importantly, what are we buying, holding or selling for our clients’ portfolios. Unplanned economic and political events can affect our economic decision making but they are mostly noise around a signal.

Wealth Taxes Are in the News

How does someone get a feel for our tax system?  In business, running your own, smaller business is probably good preparation for running a larger one.  A senior executive of a large firm who was pushed out to make way for another manager, started and ran his own firm before being hired back to run the larger firm.