Mohamed El-Erian, the former PIMCO CEO, wrote a piece for Bloomberg View questioning the merits of emerging markets as an asset class. Before making his argument, El-Erian laid out three characteristics of an asset class, which I’ve paraphrased: The components share similar characteristics (i.e., geography, economic or financial commonalities, etc.) The majority of the components…

The latest SPIVA mutual fund scorecard was released last week and it was more of the same from the past few reports — the majority of active mutual funds underperformed their respective benchmarks over the past 1, 3, 5 and 10 year periods. These numbers are well-documented at this point so I’ll spare you the…

There are now 10,000 baby boomers retiring a day in the U.S. And the projections say another 10,000 are likely to retire every single day for the next 19 years. By my count, that’s roughly 70 million in total. Future retirees are starting to come to grips with this reality. I get at least a…

A recent Fidelity poll of financial advisors found that their biggest worry right now is rising interest rates over all else. It’s ironic that so many people are worried about rising rates when all rates continue to do is fall. These advisors are not alone as many investors are worried about the future prospects for…

A few weeks ago I pointed out the fact that Vanguard’s stock funds have had an enviable run of outperformance in relation to their benchmarks. I feel that the active fund industry can learn a lot from Vanguard’s process. In last weekend’s Barron’s there was a table that showed that 3 out of the top…

John Authers from the Financial Times had a great story last weekend on state of the fund management industry. This chart garnered a lot of discussion on social media:

Charlie Bilello from Pension Partners posted a great chart in a recent post:

There was a mind-blowing stat flying around last week that showed less than 10% of all U.S. stock funds are currently beating the S&P 500 in 2014. Over longer time frames, the fact that most index funds beat the majority of actively managed funds is a given at this point, but indexing always looks even better…

Tadas Viskanta from Abnormal Returns made a great point in a recent post: In the financial blogosphere and financial media we are often confronted with debates about issues that really are important only the margin. Of late discussions about active vs. passive, smart beta vs. dumb beta and alternative assets have been at the front…

It was the spring of 1976. Investors were still licking their wounds from the severe bear market of 1973-74. Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, an investment bank, was hosting a conference that matched two investing legends onstage at the same time — Ben Graham and Charles Ellis. Ellis, moderating a Q&A, asked Graham why the mid-1970s…