Short Takes: Bad Stock Predictions, Sickly Dogs of the Dow, and more

1. Larry Swedroe holds Fortune Magazine’s nose in their year 2000 list of “stocks to last the decade”. It’s important (and funny) to check up on these silly predictions that seemed smart at the time. The most amusing two entries were Enron and Nortel.

2. Remember the “Dogs of the Dow” dividend yield approach to beating the market? Preet reports that it has underperformed the market for the last 15 years. Trying to follow the latest trend is a great way to avoid the problem of having too much money. On the other hand, Larry MacDonald reports that the Canadian version is still beating the market.

3. Potato provides details on his belief that we’re in a housing bubble.

4. Big Cajun Man pulls out a math word with his third lemma of money.

5. Mike at Money Smarts has a great list of resources to check before agreeing to rent an apartment. It has been a while since I rented, but I do remember moving into a terrible building for a year. The owner had the renters assigned to different floors by race, and that isn’t even on my top 5 list of complaints about him. Number one was a forged cheque on my bank account.

6. Ed Rempel tries to defend active investment managers, but gets ripped apart by commenters.

7. Financial Highway predicts how credit card companies will react to new rules designed to protect consumers. This is a good example of unintended consequences.