Thanks to Standard and Poor’s Indices Versus Active (SPIVA) scorecard, investors are becoming ever-more aware both of the persistent underperformance of the vast majority of actively managed funds as well the lack of evidence showing any persistence among the minority of winners beyond the randomly expected. This increasing awareness has led to an inexorable trend…
Almost 10 years ago, I knew a guy on a financial rocket ship. He had a great house, a successful business and a solid income. But then things changed. With the benefit of hindsight, it was clear he bought a little too much house and spent a little too much money. At the beginning, he…
Diego Amaya, Peter Christoffersen, Kris Jacobs and Aurelio Vasquez, authors of the new paper, “Does Realized Skewness Predict the Cross-Section of Equity Returns?”, examined higher moments of volatility, skewness and kurtosis to determine if they have provided incremental explanatory power in the cross section of stock returns. Before reviewing the authors’ findings, which appear in…
I had an interesting experience recently. I gave a talk to a group of investors. In the audience were a few brokers. My presentation consisted of two basic points: 1. Send an email to your broker or financial advisor and ask them simply to confirm that they will always put your interests above their own…
Fortress Investment Group is closing its flagship hedge fund following heavy losses and investor withdrawals. The fund, which had managed more than $8 billion in 2007, saw its assets fall to $3.2 billion at the start of 2015 and then again to just $1.6 billion at the time of this week’s announcement. Fortress’s fund, which…
Behavioral economist Richard Thaler explains why financial professionals need to be familiar with psychology. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky legitimized behavioral economics—the study of how people really behave around money, as opposed to how economists say a rational person ought to behave. Read the rest of the article on Time.
The third quarter of 2015 brought hedge funds a very small amount of relief from their historically poor performance. Keep in mind, however, that hedge funds entered January coming off their sixth-straight year of trailing U.S. stocks by significant margins. And for the 10-year period from 2005 through 2014, which includes the worst bear market…
Understanding the volatility of Treasury bond returns, as well as the volatility of both the level and slope of the Treasury term-structure, are fundamental issues in finance. What’s more, they have important implications for investors and portfolio design. Researchers have offered both theory and empirical evidence that suggest important linkages between equity risk and the…
Academic researchers have presented theory, as well as empirical evidence, suggesting certain linkages between equity risk and the Treasury bond market, a relationship that clearly has important implications for investors’ understanding of markets and portfolio design. Studies, for example, have found that greater economic uncertainty leads both to higher equity volatility and increased motives for…
Behavioral finance combines the study of human behavior and cognitive psychology with traditional economic and financial theory to explain why people make irrational decisions that can lead to investment mistakes, including the mispricing of assets (which are called anomalies). The field has gained an increasing amount of attention in academia over the past 15 years…
Ken Griffin is a hedge fund manager with an enviable net worth of $7 billion. According to published reports, he recently settled a contentious divorce dispute with his wife, Anne Dias Griffin, shortly before it was scheduled to go to trial. There was a lot at stake. His wife claimed Griffin earned an unbelievable $100…
Last week, I wrote about an experience I had with a broker who took offense at the use of the term “broker” in a talk I gave to a group of investors. I found that odd because he is employed by a large brokerage firm. So I asked what he wanted to be called, and…
If a financial adviser doesn’t know what’s going on in a client’s life, the advice will suffer. Here’s one easy way to fix that. True story: Many years ago, I was meeting with a married couple for an initial data-gathering session. Halfway through the three-hour meeting — the first stage in developing a comprehensive financial…
Anna Cieslak and Pavol Povala—authors of the paper “Expected Returns in Treasury Bonds,” which was published in the September 2015 issue of The Review of Financial Studies—examined the time variation in the risk premium that investors require for holding Treasury bonds. While most of the authors’ analysis relies on data starting in 1971 (when data…
In personal finance, almost all of the advice we come across seems to focus on playing defense. We’re always looking for ways to build bigger and better walls to protect ourselves from bad behavior: Cut up the credit cards. Pay only with cash. Stick to a budget. Hide the passwords. It’s all good advice, but…