On this week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben we discuss: Some things you may not have known about index funds. Why average hedge fund fees are declining (and why most investors will still pay higher fees). Hedge funds and private equity looking to monetize the poor. Why pension funds don’t attract better investment talent….

Since stocks topped out in late-January, U.S. stocks have moved around a lot but haven’t really gone anywhere. The S&P 500 is down roughly 5% from those levels but is still positive on the year (up around 2-3% depending on when you last checked). International stocks have gotten hit even harder in recent months. The MSCI…

The Forbes 400 list of the world’s richest people looks fairly similar at the top every year. Buffet, Gates, Bezos, Bloomberg and the Walton family are at the top of the list in some order year in and year out (they’ve been joined by Mark Zuckerberg in recent years as well). But this list isn’t…

In 1961, John F. Kennedy made the audacious goal to land a man on the moon and have them return safely by the end of the decade. NASA analysts put those chances at 1 in 10 of actually happening. Neil Armstrong and his fellow astronauts on the Apollo 11 mission would never have achieved that…

On this week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben we discuss: Are household allocations to stocks too high? Is Robinhood positioning to be the bank of the future for Millennials? Collective investment trusts are way bigger than we thought. How to plan your personal finances with inconsistent income. The kind of money that can increase…

Earlier this week I wrote about how holding can be one of the hardest aspects of investing. Anyone can buy or sell but holding takes discipline. I promised a follow-up to discuss how I handle this. To offer a potential solution I’m going to walk you through my evolution on how I’ve come to think about…

One of the great things about the Internet is that it’s broken down many of the barriers to information that existed in the past. Investors can now become more informed than ever before if they know where to look and who to trust. You no longer have to go through the gatekeepers to access relevant…

I saw the following headline on CNBC last week: This was the first response that popped into my head, as shared on Twitter: This is fairly simple, and some would say obvious, advice on the markets but sometimes investors need to be reminded of the simple and obvious The obvious stuff is often the first…

A few weeks ago Steve Chen asked me on his podcast for my thoughts on zero coupon bonds and how they potentially fit into a portfolio. There are no right answers in terms of what fits into a portfolio because portfolio construction can take many shapes and forms. So when working through something like this…

In his latest memo, Oaktree Capital’s Howard Marks opined about ETFs and their liquidity profile: If you withdraw from a mutual fund, you’ll get the price at which the underlying stocks or bonds closed that day, the net asset value or NAV. But the price you get when you sell an ETF — like any security on…