My Mind on Mortgages

Over the past 4 months in NZ Tina and I have spent much of our waking moments immersed in the natural beauty which makes this country such a special place to visit.  As it does with traveling to foreign places it got me thinking about the natural treasures which are close to home that I [...]

There are very few people in the business world that I respect more than Warren Buffett (hereby referred to as “WB”).  His skill, success, conviction, simplicity, and humor are all characteristics that I have a deep admiration for.  In the past I’ve read several books which cover WB’s investment style but lack significant biographical detail.  [...]

Back in February I was able to convince my friend Kevin Hill to trade me his brand new hard bound “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell for my well worn paper-back Atlas Shrugged.  Thanks Kevin. I read Gladwell’s previous book entitled “The Tipping Point” a couple years ago and enjoyed his unique perspective in explaining how trends [...]

I ran my first and thus far my only marathon here in Portland back in October.  Tina and I trained and ran the entire marathon together (BTW, we managed to run the entire course). Much of the credit for our successful completion of the marathon goes to Tina’s friend and palates teacher Susan Schmidt.  Susan [...]

I began reading Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, on the flight from Portland to Los Angeles on the outset of my 6-month sabbatical with my wife.  I completed the 1,074 page novel on the flight to New Zealand at the conclusion of our European-leg of our trip.  WHAT A GREAT BOOK!  My only regret is [...]

My passion for economics was ignited in college thanks to my favorite professor Randy Grant (no disrespect to Jeff Summers because he was also a major influence).  For some reason economics was the one subject that made sense to me, almost as if it were intuitive. Of all the great economics classes that Linfield had [...]

I was introduced to Thomas Friedman as a senior at Linfield College.  My finance professor invited a guest speaker in for a lecture.  I don’t remember who the speaker was or what the topic of the lecture either but I do remember he was raving about a book he had recently read entitled, The Lexus [...]

Although I had heard of Studs Terkel prior to his death in October I was not familiar with his work. Upon his passing in October 2008 I read and watched a couple tributes to him by various journalists. When I learned that he specialized in “oral history” I was intrigued. Given the economic downturn we [...]

Todd Ballenger is now a professional author and speaker but his career began in the financial services industry.  In fact, during his career he has held licenses to act as a Realtor, life insurance agent, financial planner, and mortgage loan officer. His unique perspectives from each of his endeavors has led him to create what [...]

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits is considered to be Phil Fisher’s signature book on investing. This investment classic was originally published in 1958 but the content is timeless. In this book Fisher describes his unique investment criteria which is more growth oriented than the value approach that I have been more interested in as of [...]