These days anytime something goes up someone is almost sure to call it a bubble. This is especially true of anything that resides in the public eye. Index funds and ETFs fit the bill here which has led to a chorus of investors, mostly of the active fund management variety, to call these products a…

At some presentations I gave last week I included the following slide: These quotes come from an interview legendary hedge fund investor Seth Klarman gave to the Wall Street Journal. Klarman isn’t as well known to the general investing public as some of his peers but his track record ranks right up there in terms of the…

In my 36 Obvious Investment Truths, number 24 stated: 24. Most backtests work better on a spreadsheet than in the real world because of competition, taxes, transaction costs and the fact that you can’t backtest your emotions. Anyone in the investment business knows there’s no such thing as a bad backtest (although the recycle bin…

This week I took a short tour of the Midwest to give talks to the CFA Society of Louisville and the CFA Society of Indianapolis. Both were great audiences that asked some in depth questions and provided some good feedback, as well. A number of people also asked me to share the slides from my…

I often tell my wife it’s quite possible my three young children won’t have to drive if they don’t want to once they reach that age because of the potential that we see self-driving cars by that time. The benefits of self-driving cars could be enormous — far fewer deaths on the roads, more efficient…

Investors spend a lot of time looking at historical data series and market relationships but very little time studying how investors allocate their capital. Investor preferences and needs can have huge ramifications on the markets. In this piece I wrote for Bloomberg I look at how investor preferences for stocks have changed over the years…

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…

After writing about some of the reasons for the potential retirement crisis a few weeks ago I gave the standard prescription for the solution for most retirees — a combination of working longer, living on less, and reducing expectations for their retirement dreams. Then I received an email from two of my retired readers, Edd…

“There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.” – Aristotle People with brain damage may make better investment decisions. That’s the conclusion of a study from 2005 by a team of researchers who looked at the gambling habits of different subjects. They studied patients who had lesions in the emotional areas of their…

Risk is a tricky concept to grasp because most people don’t really understand what their true risks are. We tend to worry about things that are readily available in our memories while spending little time worrying about problems that could be years or decades out into the future. For the majority of investors, their biggest…