Investors are inundated with rules of thumb, anecdotal evidence, and soundbites that are put out there as 100% fact yet nothing to back them up. Markets don’t have hard and fast rules that you can follow where the future will always look like the past. But there are many myths purported to be true that…
Expert Judgment Or Lack Thereof
“Humility is attainable, even if forecasting accuracy is not.” Philip Tetlock As the 2018 market outlooks begin to flood my inbox I’m reminded of one of the best books written on the topic of expert forecasting abilities — Expert Political Judgment by Philip Tetlock. Tetlock released the first version of this book in 2006 but re-released an…
Rebalancing Your Personal Balance Sheet
A reader asks: I’d love to hear your thoughts on using stock market gains to pay down the mortgage. I’m struggling with that idea now. So you would be using equities to pay down debt to build up equity…and my head hurts. We in the finance community spend a lot of our time discussing market-related…
Animal Spirits Episode 5: Wave Pools & Market Inefficiencies
On this week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben we discuss: The Vanguard of the alternative mutual fund world. Is active management too big? ETF prices wars The psychological impact of market valuation Career risk The shrinking U.S. stock market Wave pools The problem with backtests and market anomalies The polarizing nature of Elon Musk…
The Emerging Markets Performance Cycle
Through the end of the day Monday, emerging market stocks (as proxied by VWO) are up 28% in 2017 compared to a 17% gain in U.S. stocks (SPY). While U.S. stocks have been up for 8 years in a row, emerging markets have fallen 4 of the past 8 years. All stock markets are cyclical but EM stocks…
Peer Pressure
Yale Endowment CIO David Swensen doesn’t make too many public appearances so I was excited to run across a back and forth he had with Robert Rubin this past week at the Stephen C. Freidheim Symposium on Global Economics. Swensen touched on a number of subjects investors should be interested in from expected future returns, market…
Animal Spirits Potpourri: Episodes 2-4
For our new podcast, Michael and I plan on releasing one 20-30 minute episode (lifehack: listen at 2x speed if you’re a podcast maniac like me and it’ll take you 10-15 minutes per episode) every Wednesday morning but we’ve been practicing for a few weeks (taping yourself having a conversation is not as easy as…
Being in Control of Your Own Time
The Washington Post had a fascinating profile of investor Bill Miller last week. By my count, this is the 45th comeback for Miller (give or take) according to the financial press. Miller is most well known for his streak of beating the S&P 500 for 15 years in a row as a mutual fund manager…
Introducing My New Podcast: Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben
At our EBI Conference a couple weeks ago I must have been asked by 15-20 people how I find so much time to write. I wrote about this recently but beyond the usual time management/lifehack stuff that people like to read about on the Internet, it really comes down to an interest in the topic…
Caution Alone is Not an Investment Strategy
There are no easy answers in the financial markets right now because of the run-up we’ve experienced over the past number of years. The alternative — lower valuations, higher yields, more bargains, etc. — is, however, worse because that would mean everyone would have less money in their portfolios. We have to play the hand…
