One of the things I’ve been meaning to do this summer is take an analytical look at the Shemitah, a quasi-biblical prophecy that predicts a crisis every seven years—which means the U.S. is due for “financial ruin” this year.

Today’s post is from my colleague Peter Essele, portfolio manager in Commonwealth’s Investment Management group. See you next week! — Brad

I’d say that nine out of ten questions I’ve fielded recently are some variation on the title of this post. Many people seem to think that the impending rise in rates will have a kind of snowball effect on bond markets—that rising rates will lead to price declines on bond strategies, which will lead to outflows, followed by more price declines due to forced selling, and then more outflows.

As we discussed yesterday, the next 30 years are likely to be very different from the last 30 as interest rates start to rise again. But beyond interest rates, what other large-scale changes can we expect, and how might they affect our investments?

Over the past couple of days, I’ve had several conversations about investing. Nothing new there, but a question came up that deserved some serious thought: What do you really believe, or really know, about investing?

It’s been 15 years since the dot-com boom and bust, and the Nasdaq has finally reclaimed its old high. Both the Dow and the S&P 500 have hit a bunch of new highs since then, but the Nasdaq, which flew higher and crashed harder, didn’t make it back to the top of the mountain until yesterday.

I’m giving a talk today at the Commonwealth Business Experience conference, which, as usual, has been just wonderful. But as I woke up this morning, to go over my presentation one more time, I realized that it’s April Fools’ day.

Not, perhaps, the best day to give a presentation, but it does give me a certain amount of wiggle room for anything I might get wrong . . .

Yesterday was a bad one for the markets, with the S&P 500 falling almost 1.5 percent. With this morning’s additional drop, we’ve broken the 100-day moving average.

Time to worry?

In my monthly post on the economy, I look at five different indicators that, in the past, have warned of a recession coming in the next 12 to 18 months. The idea is that, even if one indicator is wrong, looking at several will give us a much better idea of what to expect.

I’m reading a very good book by investor Howard Marks titled The Most Important Thing. I’ll write a full review later, but today I want to focus on one of the book’s key points: the importance of second-order thinking.

We talked the other day about slow failure in investing, when a portfolio simply can’t generate the expected returns over time. Although investors may do well on average, the mismatch between expected returns and actual results can spell failure for some who are in the market at a poor time.