This morning the Wall Street Journal ran a story which showed that 2013 was the first year in decades that there was a net outflow from 401(k) plans. The immediate reaction by many was that this is just the start of a mass exodus from the markets by retiring baby boomers, which could have huge…

There are some compelling cases being made right now in both academic and investor circles that future U.S. stock market returns will be muted from current levels. Some are going a step further and claiming that real returns over the next decade or so will be zero or even negative. One of the most heavily…

Richard Thaler’s new book, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, is about as good as it gets when it comes to understanding how human nature and various cognitive biases affect our decisions. It’s basically a historical account of the beginnings of the field of behavior economics told through Thaler’s personal and professional experiences. The entire book…

“Investors face not one but two major risks: the risk of losing money and the risk of missing opportunities.” – Howard Marks Howard Marks updated his masterpiece this week on how he looks at risk in the markets in his latest quarterly update in a memo called Risk Revisited Again. Whenever someone as well-respected as Marks…

Four questions I’m pondering at the moment: Is “low rates and low inflation forever” the new consensus? Economists and pundits have been predicting a rise in interest rates for a number of years now, but the professional investors I talk to these days almost all seem convinced that rates will stay “lower for longer.” Many of the…

There are certain risks that exist within any business that nobody pays much attention to them until things go wrong. I never really considered business risk before witnessing it firsthand during the financial crisis. Here are a few things I saw or heard from peers in the industry:

It seems there are two extreme factions within the financial advice-giving complex when it comes to media consumption — either everything matters or nothing matters. In one corner, people pay attention to every single news item, economic data release, earnings announcement, market-moving development or geopolitical event. These people live and die with the latest headline….

Investors throw around the terms bull market and bear market with ease, but there are so many different ways to define them that it can be somewhat confusing. For some reason, a 20% gain is considered a bull market while a 20% loss is considered a bear market. Why not 19% or 21% or another…

This week I had the chance to listen a talk given by the CEO of an aerospace company that ships products all around the globe. He walked the audience through the company’s different transformations over the years and ended his discussion with a short video that demonstrated how their state of the art warehouse works.

Vanguard has a great chart in their latest ETF Perspectives newsletter that gives you a good idea about where risk usually lies during a severe stock market sell-off: Vanguard highlighted high-yield bonds to show how they typically perform worse than other types of bonds during a stock market drop. There are many investors out there…