In my 36 Obvious Investment Truths, number 24 stated: 24. Most backtests work better on a spreadsheet than in the real world because of competition, taxes, transaction costs and the fact that you can’t backtest your emotions. Anyone in the investment business knows there’s no such thing as a bad backtest (although the recycle bin…

I often tell my wife it’s quite possible my three young children won’t have to drive if they don’t want to once they reach that age because of the potential that we see self-driving cars by that time. The benefits of self-driving cars could be enormous — far fewer deaths on the roads, more efficient…

A couple weeks ago I wrote about how hard it is to offer investment advice without offering financial advice (or at the very least gaining a deep understanding of your client’s financial situation). The truth is there’s no perfect solution for offering financial advice or investment management. Every person, family or organization has varying degrees of…

It’s hard to believe but it’s now been 10 years since the first rumblings began prior to the Great Financial Crisis. My guess is we’ll be re-living many of the events that led to the worst crisis since the Great Depression in the months and years ahead. Financial stocks and some home builders saw some…

It’s much easier to come up with the reasons for a bear market after the fact so I like the idea of thinking these things through beforehand, even if it’s impossible to predict the future. Here’s a piece I wrote for Bloomberg laying out some possible scenarios that could derail this bull market. ******* I…

Earlier this week I wrote about the attributes successful investors share but I forgot one — a deep understanding of financial market history. This history proves to be more of a guide to human psychology than a road map for beating the market. No two market environments are ever exactly the same but fear, greed,…

The mid-to-late 1990s in Major League Baseball saw a huge uptick in home runs as steroid use became rampant. Records were being shattered every year as everyone ignored how huge these guys were all getting during a time when there was basically no drug testing. The steroids era in baseball coincided with something of a…

I’ve spent a good chunk of my career looking at various funds, strategies, presentations, pitch books and sales pitches from money managers. While this experience has come from all sorts of different fund structures, asset classes and styles, there are many similarities between the narratives when you listen to enough of these pitches. Every firm, portfolio…

One of the market myths I covered in my book is that a higher yield makes something a safer or better investment. Income alone doesn’t tell the entire story. You have to look at total return and the risks involved with those higher yields. This piece I wrote for Bloomberg looks at the risks involved…

Bonds will provide an interesting case study in investor behavior in the years ahead. With interest rates at much lower levels than they have been in the recent past the same change in rates will now lead to much more volatility in bonds than it would have at the higher rates seen in the past….