Hey Bob, how are you? I'm great Tottis. Hey, I'm on the line with Robert Seywright, who is the chief investment officer for Madison Avenue Securities, which is a boutique broker dealer and investment advisory firm in San Diego, California.

Bob also blogs at above the market.

And I asked him on today to talk about a recent post of his entitled,

How's your aim?

So for Bob, this is a relatively light-hearted post,

but gets to a very important issue, namely the significance

of having well-established benchmarks in place

against which we can measure our investment performance.

So that's a good place to start Bob.

Was there a specific incident that inspired you to write this post?

Yeah, actually it was a particularly disgusting incident in an airport bathroom that was so vile that it made an impression on me that I won't soon forget.

And then shortly thereafter,

I was in a really upscale winery restaurant and I saw a fly decal in the urinal to aim at and that

reminded me that I've been meaning to write this post for at least a couple of years.

And so between those two things I decided to do it.

Well, it's funny because anybody who's blog for any any amount of time

knows that sometimes you just have ideas and they sort of sit sort of in your

subconscious for a while for a while and eventually they come out and so it was interesting to see this

post in that regard. Well I was initially going to write a longer one of

course it was me and I write longer stuff mostly and in fact when when your

colleague Josh Brown retweeted it earlier today he made a comment about how to choose your benchmark rather than the importance

of having one.

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