Earlier this week, we began discussing 10 important lessons that the markets taught us in 2015 about the prudent investment strategy. In lessons one through three, we explored active management as a loser’s game, the “conventional wisdom” about the correlation between the economy and the stock market, and the “Sell in May” myth. Today we’ll…
Hedge funds began 2015 coming off their sixth-straight year of trailing U.S. stocks (as measured by the S&P 500 Index) by significant margins. And for the 10-year period ending 2014, one that included the worst bear market in the post-Depression era, the HFRX Global Hedge Fund Index returned just 0.7% per year, underperforming every single…
A recent article in The Wall Street Journal contained a headline that very likely frightened many investors — and in my opinion, that’s precisely what it was meant to do. Otherwise, why inform investors that “U.S. public pension plans and mutual funds are sheltering more of their holdings in cash than they have in years,…
How about that 550-point intraday dive last week in the Dow! Did that finally get you to sell? Or was it one of the many headlines about the trillions of dollars that have been wiped out of the stock market in the worst start for the Dow in history — since 1897! And worst start…
So far, we’ve covered seven important lessons that the market taught investors in 2015 about the prudent investment strategy. These lessons, some of which repeat year after year, have addressed active management as a loser’s game; the correlation between the stock market and the economy; the “Sell in May” myth; fear about inflation; the mistake…
2016 Roadmap For Dealing with Stockbrokers Read the rest of the article at The Huffington Post.
I have a problem: It’s really hard for me to say no to new, exciting projects. If you’re doing creative work at all (and I’m using this term very broadly, so that should mean just about everybody), then you’ve probably run into this problem yourself. There are endless options for how you could spend your…
As sure as the sun rises in the east, at the start of each year, you’ll hear from “gurus” appearing in the financial media that this year will be a stock picker’s year. And as sure as the sun sets in the west, when the year ends, you will hear various excuses for why it…
Leonard Kostovetsky and Jerold Warner, the authors of the study You’re Fired! New Evidence on Portfolio Manager Turnover and Performance, which was published in the August 2015 issue of the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, contribute to the literature on the performance of money managers by examining managerial turnover at both internally managed mutual…
From 1980 to 2014, the percentage of American households that owned mutual funds rose from 5.7 percent to 43.4 percent. At the beginning of 1980, mutual funds held only around 4 percent of all U.S. equity. However, that figure is now around 30 percent. That increased share is basically explained by the fact that direct…
As markets start off the new year with a global slide in prices, you may want to re-acquaint yourself with a concept often found in standard introductory courses on economics–the difference between systematic and nonsystematic risk. Your retirement assets could depend on it. While those words may sound like a bunch of financial mumbo jumbo,…
Suppose you had a friend whose lifelong dream was to travel overseas. But this friend was deathly afraid of experiencing turbulence on an airplane. So he decided to forgo his trip until a new plane was invented, one able to guarantee with absolute certainty that passengers would never feel turbulence. You might be thinking, “Good…
The headline of a December article in The New York Times declared: “Private Equity Fees Are Sky-High, Yes, but Look at Those Returns.” The author, Steven Davidoff Solomon, was making the case that while “critics love to complain about private equity and its exorbitant fees … as an asset class and with the right fund,…
At the start of 2015, I put together a list of predictions that financial “gurus” had made for the upcoming year, especially the ones that gained consensus as “sure things.” I then kept track, through a series of periodic updates, of whether these “sure thing” forecasts actually came to pass. Well, the inevitable turn of…
How do some of the market’s most recognizable active mutual fund families stack up to a comparable passive counterpart? To explore that question, I’ll continue my evaluation of active fund performance with an in-depth look the Hartford family of funds to determine whether the firm adds value for investors. Why Hartford? Aside from its prominent…