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I was looking forward to attending the spring National Association of Personal Financial Advisors Conference last week in Denver. A bonus was the Cincinnati Reds were scheduled to play the Denver Rockies. Instead of being in Denver, I attended a virtual conference.

Sarah Newcomb, director of behavioral science at Morningstar Inc., gave a presentation on reframing retirement.

As diligently as I try to polish my crystal ball, the future still looks a bit cloudy to me. Here in Indiana in mid-May, some businesses are re-opening. However, it seems unlikely that decisions being made locally and regionally will prove to be well coordinated nationally.

Does anyone remember a professional boxer named Cassius Clay? He later became famous as Muhamad Ali but back in February of 1964 he was scheduled to fight Sonny Liston, then heavyweight champion of the world. Because newspaper writers are paid to produce articles, the bout was well previewed with fifty-nine of sixty-two sports columnists picking Liston to win.

Better known in English as Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace is widely considered to have been one of the world’s greatest writers but his potential aptitude for financial planning may be somewhat less well known.

Tricksters abound in times of crisis. They are opportunistic and clever. As the COVID-19 outbreak advances, so do their efforts. According to the FBI, scammers and fraud perpetrators “see a vulnerable population out there that they can prey upon. People are scared and looking for help. People are trying to protect themselves and their families.

Long-term clients & friends may remember this article which I wrote back during 2007-2009’s Great Recession.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” —Mark Twain

So how does our current situation rhyme with past market challenges? As I write this article, I don’t know what the weeks or months ahead hold for the stock market or the economy, but we can sometimes get clues by looking at the past.

It helps to understand the vocabulary market pundits and economists use.

At least to a limited extent, Warren Buffet and I had the same teacher: Benjamin Graham. The other Warren studied under him in grad school at Columbia and I’ve read his most famous book multiple times.

Calculus, as you may remember, makes it possible to compute the area under a curve by imagining a series of narrow rectangles. The secret to the calculation is that if you make the rectangular slices infinitely narrow, each section of the curve can be thought of as a straight line forming the top of a rectangle.