Once Upon A Time...


Once Upon A Time...

Those are the words often used to begin a fairy tale. Fairy tales often start in an idyllic setting and finish with a happy ending. They invariably feature a fairly family-friendly theme and provide an underlying moral to the story. Unicorns and rainbows come immediately to mind when thinking about fairy tales. Goldilocks, Cinderella, and Little Red Riding Hood are some of my all-time favorites that can be found in any public library or on the Disney Channel. Here is a more complete list of fairy tales from around the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fairy_tales

The legend of Thomas A. Carroll

The Race is a portion of Long Island Sound between Fishers Island and Plum Island. It is one of four gaps through which all of the tidal waters from Long Island Sound fill and drain twice each day in their moon-driven cycles. Because the depths change so rapidly in this part of the sound, the currents are constantly swirling and the waves can get pretty choppy. Anglers love this area because, well, that is where the fish like to swim. For traditional mariners, however, The Race represented a dangerous corridor littered with hidden reefs and harrowing shipwrecks.

After several shipwrecks - one of which took down 45 souls - construction of a lighthouse began in 1871. Like most navigational aids of that time, the foundation took many years to construct and featured many setbacks before the superstructure was complete in 1879. The first lighthouse Keeper was selected for service in 1880.

Thomas A. Carroll was a family man based in Noank on the Connecticut shore. He was retrieving supplies in January 1885 when a storm rolled in,  blocking his access back to his duty station. Thomas waited out a portion of the storm, but then rowed out toward the lighthouse to keep the lights on - so to speak. The lights never did go back on and his body was never recovered. Like many lighthouses along the eastern seaboard, Race Rock Lighthouse was automated in the 1970s and no longer required a resident Keeper to maintain the light. Maintenance crews are still required to make routine visits to each such navigational station. Those who travel to this remote site report strange sounds and unexplained events - even to this day. Learn more by visiting here! https://seewesterly.com/the-haunting-of-race-rock-light/

Dis Ain't No [Ship]...

Those are the words often used to start a sea story. You be the judge of what is fiction and what is fact. Fair winds and following seas to you Mr. Thomas A. Carroll. Happy Halloween!


Location: 23 Foxridge Rd, West Hartford, CT 06107, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Strategic Versus Tactical Asset Allocation

Image
  Source : FRED Data, JQR Capital The Market Portfolio A few weeks ago we introduced a cash asset to augment our efficient frontier set of bond plus stock portfolios.The cash asset allowed us to combine cash with the one portfolio along the efficient frontier that had the highest return versus risk (AKA the Sharpe Ratio). This one portfolio can be thought of as the tangency portfolio or - more commonly - the market portfolio (MP). The mix of bonds versus stocks in the MP will change over time with changes in interest rates and changes in expected returns for our bond and stock indices. The chart below is a quick snapshot of how the risk free rate of cash interest (Rf) interacts with the efficient frontier to create the market portfolio (MP) at only one point in time. This snapshot was taken a few weeks ago. Source : FRED Data, JQR Capital Introducing Naive Forecasting  The chart shown above was generated using average return and risk data over the 1973 to 2022 time period. The hardest
Read more

The Four Most Dangerous Words

Image
The Four Most Dangerous Words... The late great Sir John Marks Templeton - of Templeton Growth Fund fame - once quipped that the four most dangerous words to an investor were: "this time is different." Many market strategists warn that the sky is falling or that the investing principles that worked in the past no longer hold true in this new world of artificial intelligence and political unrest. The truth is that the facts and situations are (slightly) different from anything in the near or distant past. The rest of the story is that the human reaction, however, is the same and reasonably predictable. Read MORE ! Mean Reversion Works In my blog post two weeks ago, I used the analogy of a spring traveling through time while being exposed to compression and extension forces. This spring never gets smushed into a pancake - just the way it never snaps in half. When the forces are briefly taken away, the spring reverts back to the normal (unforced) state. This same principle can b
Read more

Take Your 2023 RMDs

Image
  Take Your 2023 RMDs If someone in your family has turned 73 in 2023, it may be time to start taking the required minimum distributions (RMDs) from an old 401(k) or a traditional IRA. These distributions are required so that the IRS can collect tax revenues on these “before tax” contributions. The laws for these RMDs recently changed and HERE is a quick guide designed to help you estimate how much you need to take out before April 1, 2024. The good news is that the penalty for missing your RMD has gone down from 50% to 25%. Happy Holidays! Convert To A Roth IRA One way to minimize your lifetime tax burden may be to convert your old 401(k) to a Roth IRA. Two of my financial planning clients recently toyed with the idea of converting their before tax money to after tax money through the Roth conversion process. For one of them (a single female, aged 69), a Roth conversion could allow her to generate $55,413 in additional wealth over her expected lifetime. For the other planning client
Read more