The price of oil seems to be at the forefront of every market and economic conversation these days. That tends to happen when one of the most important commodities on the planet falls 80% in a short period of time. Is it too much supply? Not enough demand? The pricing in of future technological advancements? Speculators?…

Long/short funds are one of those strategies that is wonderful in theory but very difficult to pull off successfully in practice. These funds go long the stocks they think are going to rise and go short the stocks they think are going to fall. So they should be able to make money in a wide…

Morningstar’s Jeffrey Ptak posted some insightful data on Twitter over the long holiday weekend. Take a look at these 10 year performance numbers for actively managed mutual funds once you account for the effects of taxes on investment returns:

If you missed part I in my Q&A with Charles Kirk, from The Kirk Report, see here. Here’s part II:

Institutional investors are often referred to as the ‘smart money’ or ‘sophisticated investors.’ For some funds this is true, but many of these large pools of capital make the same exact mistakes as mom and pop retail investors. It’s just that the reasons are different. Here are a few studies to consider: One study looked…

“What is the reward of being right, benchmarked against the cost of being wrong?” – David Rosenberg For a number of years David Rosenberg was one of the top dogs at one of the largest, most well-known firms on Wall Street. As he told Barry Ritholtz on a recent episode of Masters in Business, it…

I’m a huge fan of the WTF podcast from Marc Maron. Maron has an uncanny ability to get celebrities to open up on both personal and professional matters. In a recent episode he was talking to actor Jason Bateman, who’s one of my favorite comedic actors (Arrested Development, Bad Words, Juno, etc.). Bateman plays the…

Top quartile private equity performance is something every institutional fund aspires to. Of course, every single PE fund claims to be top quartile, which would seem to be mathematically impossible. David Swensen and his team at Yale have put together one of the most enviable track records in this space. This passage comes from the…

One of the biggest problems with the way many financial firms operate is that they prescribe before they diagnose. They first create a product or portfolio and then try to convince people to invest in it. They try to make a sale without first gaining an understanding of their potential client’s circumstances. It’s completely backwards….

Josh Kaufman, author of the book The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business, had a great post recently on what he call strategic apathy. Some highlights: In my essay on Status Malfunction, we discussed the problem of allowing the promise of social status to warp our decision-making. We didn’t discuss the solution: making a conscious, deliberate…