Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives. The financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the resulting deep bear market challenged conventional wisdoms as well as modern portfolio theory.

You certainly wouldn’t know it from a reading of the CBOE S&P500 Volatility Index (CBOE:VIX), which printed a low of 11.

Q2 2016 has been marked by political unrest. Political rhetoric has been all-consuming as the U.S. gears up for a presidential race that promises to be both entertaining and divisive. Amid the uncertainty that has come from this, the stock market has found no difficulty in rising unabated.

Armor Residential REIT, Inc. (NYSE:ARR) has performed terribly in the last few years, with its shares decreasing from $56 in 2013 to $20 in recent months. While it is true most investors have lost confidence in the company, the REIT’s fundamentals have consistently improved recently.

Have you ever tried to find a lightweight yet nice theme for the R Markdown documents, like this page? The html_document engine uses the Bootswatch theme library to support different styles of the document.

Playing with GA data is much much easier now. Last week biggest news was definitely Google making a Demo Google Analytics Account available to everyone.

Was Benjamin Graham, the father of security selection and value investing, and a superstar whose name constantly arises on SA, really an indexer at heart? Of course, that is the very antithesis of his reputation.

Ok, so I’m not going to tell you any stories or make any movie references on this one. Sorry. I’ve got a New York Strip waiting on me uptown. Wait, I guess that was a mini-story. Damn.

1997 paper from Michael Mauboussin: “Thoughts on Valuation” [H/T @BrattleStCap] (LINK)This underscores the important point that P/E multiples are not a determinant of value, but rather a function of value. On Wall Street, the typical valuation formula is EPS x P/E = value.

In the first article of this series, I applied a mostly philosophical, comparative approach in an effort to assess general dividend stock worth and current associated risk for total return minded investors.