In February 2012, a group of experienced skiers headed into the backcountry near the Stevens Pass resort in Washington State to look for untracked powder. It was a beautiful day, and everyone expected to have a great time skiing the popular Tunnel Creek section. Minutes after the first skiers began heading down the …Read More.
How many times have you had a conversation when you or the other person said something like: “I’m so worried about the stock market.” “I’m so worried about retirement.” “I’m so worried about the value of my home.” Assuming you have said or heard a derivation of one of these statements, ask yourself a big …Read More.
Throughout the course of my career, I’ve heard a lot of financial horror stories. The majority of these stories are told by baby boomers whose aggressive stock market strategies went bust, often at the behest of a transaction-oriented “advisor.” The most pain—yes, even marginally greater than that of former Enron employees and Bernie Madoff scam …Read More.
Recently, an adviser told me how one of his clients was scammed out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by his son. Let’s call the client “Bill,” the son “Robert,” the adviser “Phil” and the advisory firm “Registered.” Phil works on a team at Registered with another wealth adviser and a portfolio manager. All three interact …Read More.
In 2006, I wrote The Smartest Investment Book You’ll Ever Read. Prior to that time, many investment books were long and mind-numbing, filled with charts, and intended to make investing so complex that readers would be incentivized to consult with the author or other financial experts. Smartest Investment broke the mold. It was short and pithy. It …Read More.
A recent article by Motley Fool took dead aim at the cost of working with a financial advisor. The title says it all: “The Invisible and Brutal Cost of Using a Financial Advisor.” The premise of the article can be summarized as follows: 1. A hypothetical advisory fee of 1 percent of assets per year significantly reduces …Read More.
Few can forget the iconic phrase in the movie “Jerry Maguire,” when Tom Cruise says, “Show me the money!” Here’s a similar mantra that will change the way you invest: “Show me the evidence!” A cursory review of what passes for “financial advice” demonstrates the importance of following this mantra. Here’s a sampling: Pimco’s advice. Virginie …Read More.
An overwhelming body of evidence demonstrates that the majority of investors would be better off if they adopted indexed investment strategies. And while a total-stock-market index is fine for many investors, indexed investors who desire certain types of exposure face a number of problems. These problems can be addressed with what I call “structured portfolios.” …Read More.
Today concludes our discussion on international stocks and whether investors should consider them in their portfolios. Negative tracking error has resulted in my receiving an increasing amount of calls questioning the wisdom of investing in international stocks. To help you avoid making the mistake of recency, here are two questions to ask yourself: First: While …Read More.
Today begins a two-part series on investing in international stocks. Over the past four years, international investments have done poorly relative to domestic investments. For example, from 2010 through 2013, while the S&P 500 Index returned 15.9 percent per year, the MSCI EAFE Index returned just 8.6 percent per year, and the MSCI Emerging Markets …Read More.
As I’ve previously discussed, the Federal Reserve’s zero-interest-rate policy has “pushed” many investors—especially those who use a cash-flow approach as opposed to a total-return approach—to look to stocks and equity funds that have a high dividend yield; that is, that have a low price-to-dividend ratio. Adding to their attraction is that a high-dividend strategy has …Read More.
The goal of actively managed funds is to generate alpha – returns above the appropriate risk-adjusted benchmark. We might add here that the alpha should also be sufficient to compensate for the increased idiosyncratic risks active managers take by failing to fully diversify, and that the only way to generate alpha is to hold a …Read More.
Professors of finance Brad Barber and Terrance Odean have done extensive research on the performance and habits of individual investors. Among their findings is that, on average, individual investors lose money from trading – and not all of the losses can be explained by trading costs. They’ve found that individual investors can have perverse security …Read More.
The term private equity – PE – is used to describe various types of privately placed (non-publicly traded) investments. It has grown tremendously over the past 30 years – thanks largely to America’s pension funds as they search for alternatives to public equity markets that might help them meet their return objectives. Frank Jian Fan, …Read More.
Tying up our two-part series on premiums, today we’ll explore the equity premium. Claude Erb has done a series of papers in which he examines the various premiums – size, value, momentum, and beta – and found that there’s a demonstrable trend in each case of the premiums shrinking in terms of realized returns. His April …Read More.
