The annual update of my favorite performance chart drew a number of good responses and questions. I’m going to go through two that I thought were worth some more digging: Question 1: Can you take this allocation quilt back 20 years? The past 10 years have felt like complete and utter domination by large cap…
Asset Allocation
Updating My Favorite Performance Chart For 2019
My annual look at asset class returns over the past 10 years.
A Eulogy for the 60/40 Portfolio
The 60/40 portfolio passed away on October 16, 2019, from complications of low interest rates and a bad case of Fed manipulation. This is the 27th time 60/40 has died in the past decade but enemies market timing, day traders, and alternative investments are hopeful it will stick this time around. 60/40 was 91 years…
Everybody Wins!
2019 has been a good year for pretty much everything in the financial markets. U.S. stocks, long-term government bonds, and gold are all up big this year: I can’t remember a year when all three of these very different assets were all up so much at the same time. So I looked back at the…
Investing Proceeds From the Sale of a Business
What if you received a million dollars from the sale of a business in your early-30s?
The Optimal Portfolio
This year has been kind to stock and bond markets around the globe: But I’m sure there are some investors who hate to see the bond performance holding their portfolio back when stocks are doing so well. If we zoom out to the past year — which includes the brief bear market in late-2018 —…
A Lesson in Portfolio Correlations
Stocks and bonds have a long-term correlation close to zero. Why that’s a good thing.
3 Ways to Decrease Your Portfolio’s Volatility
Simple ways to decrease the volatility in your portfolio without getting to complex.
4 Overlooked Investment Decisions
In the hierarchy of institutional investors, pension plans get picked on the most. Endowments and foundations are the mean girls of this space, generally looking down at their pension brethren because they all assume pensions are the last to the party when it comes to innovative investment ideas. In my experience, this is often unwarranted…
Prudent Risk Management or Market Timing in Disguise?
A podcast listener asks: I work at a pension fund steadily losing performance chasing members (we were positioned too conservatively through the bull market) – and now the investment committee wants to be more “peer-aware”. I tend to think now is not the time to make a more aggressive allocation, but part of me also…
