A reader asks: I’d love to hear your thoughts on using stock market gains to pay down the mortgage.  I’m struggling with that idea now. So you would be using equities to pay down debt to build up equity…and my head hurts. We in the finance community spend a lot of our time discussing market-related…

On this week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben we discuss: The Vanguard of the alternative mutual fund world. Is active management too big? ETF prices wars The psychological impact of market valuation Career risk The shrinking U.S. stock market Wave pools The problem with backtests and market anomalies The polarizing nature of Elon Musk…

Through the end of the day Monday, emerging market stocks (as proxied by VWO) are up 28% in 2017 compared to a 17% gain in U.S. stocks (SPY). While U.S. stocks have been up for 8 years in a row, emerging markets have fallen 4 of the past 8 years. All stock markets are cyclical but EM stocks…

Yale Endowment CIO David Swensen doesn’t make too many public appearances so I was excited to run across a back and forth he had with Robert Rubin this past week at the Stephen C. Freidheim Symposium on Global Economics. Swensen touched on a number of subjects investors should be interested in from expected future returns, market…

For our new podcast, Michael and I plan on releasing one 20-30 minute episode (lifehack: listen at 2x speed if you’re a podcast maniac like me and it’ll take you 10-15 minutes per episode) every Wednesday morning but we’ve been practicing for a few weeks (taping yourself having a conversation is not as easy as…

The Washington Post had a fascinating profile of investor Bill Miller last week. By my count, this is the 45th comeback for Miller (give or take) according to the financial press. Miller is most well known for his streak of beating the S&P 500 for 15 years in a row as a mutual fund manager…

At our EBI Conference a couple weeks ago I must have been asked by 15-20 people how I find so much time to write. I wrote about this recently but beyond the usual time management/lifehack stuff that people like to read about on the Internet, it really comes down to an interest in the topic…

There are no easy answers in the financial markets right now because of the run-up we’ve experienced over the past number of years. The alternative — lower valuations, higher yields, more bargains, etc. — is, however, worse because that would mean everyone would have less money in their portfolios. We have to play the hand…

In the U.S., the standard distance between railroad train tracks is four feet, eight-and-a-half inches wide. The reason for this distance is because that was the measurement used in England and the U.S. railroads were built by British expats. The reason the British used this distance is because it was the same measurement used on…

During the next bear market… …someone will become a hero. A pundit, portfolio manager or resident doomsayer will “call” the crash and nail the timing. It will be mostly luck but will likely lead to a number of TV appearances, speaking gigs, and maybe a book deal or two. …your favorite pundit won’t be able to save…