Possessing a well-thought-out asset allocation plan that takes into account your unique ability, willingness and need to take market risk is only the necessary condition for success in investing (unless you just happen to get very lucky). The sufficient condition is having the discipline to stay the course. That’s certainly not easy to do when…
Last week, Financial Advisor magazine published a story announcing that one of the mutual fund industry’s oldest funds, run by one of its most enduring fund managers, Kenneth Heebner, went out of business when Natixis Global Asset Management liquidated its CGM Advisor Targeted Equity Fund. According to the article, at its end, the fund had…
As the director of research for The BAM Alliance—a community of about 140 like-minded RIA firms who believe in providing a fiduciary standard of care using an evidence-based investment strategy—I often get requests from other advisors for my help in answering questions from clients about articles they’ve read in the financial media. As such, I…
Among the more notable anomalies in modern finance is the finding that the lowest-beta stocks have produced higher returns than the highest-beta stocks. Another anomaly is that idiosyncratic (diversifiable) volatility negatively predicts equity returns. In other words, stocks with the lowest idiosyncratic volatility outperform stocks with the highest idiosyncratic volatility. These findings have spurred a…
Recent research on equities has found that, in contrast to classical economic theory, the term-structure of stock returns is downward-sloping. Stocks with low cash-flow duration earn higher returns than longer-duration stocks. The duration of equities is defined as the weighted average time to maturity of cash flows. It comes from summing up discounted cash flows…
Whether you are planning to retire, or are already retired, Jane Bryant Quinn’s “How to Make Your Money Last: The Indispensable Retirement Guide” is one of the best “investments” you can make. Ms. Quinn is one of the leading journalists in personal finance. She clearly cares very deeply about helping investors find the right answers…
A recent article in The Wall Street Journal proposed that investors consider five factors before investing in emerging markets. One of these five factors was the flexibility of active funds. The author, Michael Pollock, writes: “Managers of active funds can make distinctions among that huge range of stocks that an index-tracking fund doesn’t make.” The…
At the end of 2014, Tom Lee, co-founder and head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors, explained why only about one out of five actively managed funds were able to outperform their benchmark index that year, and why he believed that 2015 could be huge for stock pickers. In fact, “2015 should be a very…
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…
Every year, the market provides us with important lessons on the prudent investment strategy. Many times, the market will offer investors remedial courses, covering lessons that it has already delivered in previous years. That’s why one of my favorite sayings is that there’s nothing new in investing; there is only investment history you don’t yet…
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…
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…
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…