One of the people we hold most dear includes this article’s title in their outgoing voice mail message. This request has caused some degree of anxiety. Of course we understand the message is not a personal challenge, merely an artsy and fun departure from the ordinary. The difficulty for an investment professional is the work we do just isn’t that interesting to many. In fact, it’s mundane at best and probably better described as tedious. What to do?

We attempt to remain wide-eyed when observing the world around us, always looking for interesting kernels we can store away for future use. Of most interest to us is information that challenges or completely changes what we previously believed. We thought we’d share a few things that may challenge or change what you know or believe.

Bananas do not grow on trees. In fact they grow on massive herbs that resemble trees.

Bats are not blind. They do use echolocation effectively however they see just fine.

The Great Wall of China is not visible from space.

Napoleon was not short. In fact he was 5’7’’ tall which was above average for a French male at the time.

Sharks absolutely do get cancer, especially skin cancer.

Dropped pennies cannot kill regardless from what height they are dropped. Their terminal (or maximum) velocity is between 30 and 50 miles per hour which is not fast enough.

Cash, or more commonly money market funds, are in fact an investment. Many believe that whatever portion of their portfolio in cash remains un-invested but this is not true. Cash is merely a lower risk/return almost perfectly fungible investment. While cash provides a variety of benefits to investment portfolios perhaps the easiest to understand is it is far better to earn nothing or almost nothing than to lose value in things like stocks, bonds, or real estate which happen to be going down in price.

If stocks go down, bonds go up and vice-versa. Not necessarily true. While this has happened in specific periods of time it is by no means axiomatic. There have been many periods where the prices of broad stock and bond market indexes have moved in different directions.

Given our last point we believe investors do well to consider the second to last as we’re expecting an interesting summer to say the least.

Beep.

Credit to Informationisbeautiful.net