One of the oldest tricks in the book for good financial salespeople (and those in any industry really) is to talk over people’s heads using jargon that makes it hard for others to understand them. Jargon is the often the preferred method of the financial community to make themselves sound more intelligent. ‘Just trust me, I…

I wrote the following piece for Bloomberg a couple weeks before the start of the stock market correction that saw stocks fall 10% or so. If you’ve been listening to the podcast, we went over some of the answers to these questions but this was still far too short of a time frame to make…

The stock market got interesting again this week. Volatility is back after having gone missing for the past 18 months or so. I saw the following words spewed across the financial media this week: turbulence, fear, pain, panic, distress, agony. It’s still a little early for all of that. As of the close on Thursday,…

Useful benchmarking is one of the hardest things to do for institutional investors because of the way they structure their portfolios. Take a look latest asset allocations for college endowment funds from the annual study done by the National Association of College University Business Officers (NACUBO): Alternative investments are now the biggest allocation for all…

There’s never been a better time to be an investor. Expenses are coming down. It’s cheaper than ever to trade. Strategies that were once reserved for large institutional funds at exorbitant fees are now available to every investor through low-cost mutual funds and ETFs. The sheer amount of data and computing power available has completely leveled…

On this week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben we discuss: What to do if you’ve been sitting in cash during the bull market. The latest change I made to my personal portfolio. What trend-following is and why it’s a difficult concept for investors to grasp. The worst bear market no one ever talks about….

Since I wrote this piece for Bloomberg in late-October there has been an additional 14 new all-time highs in the S&P 500. I’m often asked why the market continues to trudge higher in the face of so much uncertainty in the world. The simplest explanation is this idea of momentum. Momentum is by far the…

Investors have been hearing about bond market bubbles since the financial crisis. Interest rates have refused to budge but even if/when they do rise most of the people proclaiming this is a “bond bubble” don’t really understand what that means. There’s a huge difference between how bonds and stocks are structured and many of those…

The Wall Street Journal published a story last week about the investing program for the foundation of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). FINRA is a nonprofit that’s tasked with regulating the broker-dealer industry to ensure investors aren’t getting taken advantage of. FINRA itself has a $1.6 billion investment portfolio that leaves much to be…

My first boss in this industry was old school. One of the first things he taught me to help understand the institutional investment landscape was the Prudent Man Rule. This was a piece of legislation from the 1800s that basically outlined the idea behind being a fiduciary when managing assets for other people. The Prudent…