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Such an amazing weekend for sports enthusiasts. Yankees and Blue Jays battled down to the wire. Two of the best college football games between GA and AL as well as Penn State and Oregon. Cowboys and Packers play no defense in a 40-40 tie. And of course, the biennial Ryder Cup which I had planned my whole Friday through Sunday around for the past year. Having played golf for 52 years and in hundreds of tournaments, the armchair golfer in me feels it all. Unfortunately, Europe thumped America yet again in what was a total blowout until Sunday afternoon. And I hate the way this event has become regarding fan behavior. It’s embarrassing to see dozens of state police needing to guard the European players. I take this personally. Our team was weak. The process for selecting our team was flawed. If it doesn’t change, neither will the outcome.

Sitting with my family bemoaning our Ryder Cup failure again, I explained that this is no different from managing money. We have a process. It’s based on data and research that stands up to scrutiny over the years and decades. It’s not the same process I used in 1988 when I came into the industry. I have had plenty of failures. And I will likely have plenty more. But I hopefully learn from them and reassess our process as needed. As I like to share with clients, long-term failure is not an option.

The weakest week of the weakest month of the year is now over. Unlike the warnings and cautionary advice from the media and pundits in late August, only a few of us discussed last week’s seasonal headwind. If you’re keeping score at home, the S&P 500 began the week at 6664 and ended at 6644 for a loss of 0.30%. So the trend continued to work, although I would be hard pressed to gloat about saving investors 0.30%, hence labeling it a headwind. In real time, we were able to prune some holdings a week ago and plant some new ones into the weakness because that was going to happen regardless.

More and more signs are popping that risk has increased substantially in the markets. The markets need at least a pause to refresh, if not a mild to moderate pullback which may or may not come. There has been a lot of chatter that this market resembles the Dotcom bubble. It doesn’t. Yet again, people who are lazy make uninformed comments without doing the research. It’s annoying.

On Friday, we bought EMB, more GO, more COST, and more IPO. We sold SSO.

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