One of my favorite takeaways from Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow is the idea of the premortem—that is, looking at a new or proposed project, assuming it has failed, and projecting why that happened. (It's a more proactive version of the postmortem, where you look at actual failures and try to figure out what went wrong.)

I’m working on two things right now: my economic and market outlook for 2015, and an update on the international economic scene that I’ll present at Commonwealth’s top-producer conferences.

The problem I’m facing with both, I realize, is that the world has really changed in the past couple of years, and the recent past is no longer a good guide to the future.

I recently took a look at housing for the first time in six months or so, and I thought it was time to examine the stock market in similar fashion to see where we are.

In my market commentaries and videos, I have continued to discuss the positive trends and healthy fundamentals—which are very real—but we also need to consider the broader context. The following three indicators paint a somewhat cautionary picture.  

As the industry that led us to disaster in 2008, housing has had a long road back. You can make a good argument that, until the housing market returns to normal, the economy hasn’t really recovered. While not a defining indicator, a healthy housing market is a necessary condition for recovery.

I last looked at housing in June, so it’s time for an update. The news is actually quite good, despite some of the headlines recently. 

I have two reasons for writing a post on gratitude today: The first is that I have much to be grateful for (I plan to write a longer post about this next week as we approach Thanksgiving), and the second is that I have been in meetings all day and am too short on time to finish the housing market post I had planned. You’ll get that tomorrow.

“If something can’t go on forever, it will stop.” — Herb Stein

When you think about it, we really do live in an age of miracles. Less than 24 hours ago, I was in London, but I slept in my own bed last night and am back at work in Boston today. While in Europe, I kept in touch with my family via video-call and simply pulled out my credit card to pay for things. It was all astonishingly seamless.

For the past two days, I’ve been in London at a J.P. Morgan European investment summit, and a fascinating time it has been.

As investors, it's not so much the things we don't know that we need to be mindful of, but the things we don’t even know we don’t know. For Americans, how things really are in the rest of the world can easily fall into that category, so it’s been interesting to get some international perspective over the last couple of days.

Here are three of my key takeaways.

One problem I have with satellite radio is that it makes me confront my own mortality every day. Let me explain. When a song comes on, I think, Oh, I remember that; it must have come out about five years ago. But when I look at the screen, the song is invariably from the 1990s or (in particularly bad cases) from the 1980s. Perhaps I’m not as young as I feel.

That said, a bit of perspective—which is a kinder word for age—is beneficial in the economics and investing game.

I’m currently reading Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman—a great book on how we make decisions, and how we can learn to make better ones. Its assertions are shocking, and even insulting, but they’re all the more useful for it. (Look for a full review here soon.)

One of Kahneman’s points is how bad we are at remembering what we thought at a given time—and how we tend, in retrospect, to think we were much more prescient than we actually were.

As we discussed yesterday, economic slowing in the rest of the world, while certainly a headwind for the U.S. economy, isn’t really something to worry about. U.S. economic data—3.5-percent growth last quarter, plus another month of more than 200,000 jobs created—seems to support that.

But unlike economics, where U.S. exposure is relatively small, our political and institutional exposure is intense. Here are some examples of problems abroad that should seriously worry us.