All eyes are on the Fed this week as everyone is focused on whether or not they’ll finally raise short-term interest rates. The game of will they/won’t they has been playing out for some time now as it’s been nearly a decade since the Fed last raised their benchmark Fed Funds Rate.

“There’s only one absolute truth about investing…it isn’t easy.” – Howard Marks Investing is hard. Markets are extremely challenging. Beating the market is not easy. Coming to these realizations is maybe the hardest part about investing because we all like to assume that we’re above average. Case in point — a few years ago MarketWatch columnist…

When markets are rising, professional money managers typically feel terrible about their performance when they’re trailing their peers or their benchmark. They’re still making money mind you, but just not as much as everyone else is making.

Risk-adjusted return measures have been around for some time now, but following the financial crisis professional money managers and asset allocators zeroed in on these formulaic performance metrics like never before. One of the most well-known risk-adjusted return formulas, the Sharpe Ratio, is simple a measure of return per unit of risk. It takes the annual…

“60% of the time, it works every time.” – Brian Fantana

The Barclays Aggregate Index is basically the S&P 500 of the bond markets. Formerly the Lehman Brothers Aggregate Index before 2008 (you can thank Dick Fuld for that), the Barclays Agg is the bond index that all total U.S. bond market index funds are benchmarked to for tracking purposes. The biggest bond fund in the…

In a post earlier this week I wrote about famed hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt’s impressive track record from the late-1960s to the late-1970s. A few readers commented to me that nothing could be discerned from Steinhardt’s track record because it’s nearly impossible to separate luck from skill when making these types of historical performance…

The following comes from the Los Angeles Times about CalPERS, the nation’s largest public pension plan:

A couple weeks I looked at the history of corrections in long-term U.S. treasury bonds. I received a few follow-up questions from people asking for the same information on intermediate bonds for a comparison between the different bond maturities from a risk perspective. The Barclays Aggregate Index, the industry standard for an intermediate bond benchmark,…

A reader asks: Does it make sense to equal weight the Europe and Pacific ETFs as opposed to just buying the entire EAFE index fund? How has this strategy done historically? This is a great question because so many U.S. investors have a home bias within their portfolio and probably don’t spend enough time thinking…