The Harvard Management Corp., which oversees the management of the school’s endowment fund, recently lost yet another CEO. The list of ex-Harvard endowment CEOs is growing longer by the year: Harvard’s current interim chief marks the sixth person to lead the endowment since Jack Meyer left in the mid-2000s, good enough for an average tenure of just…

The old joke is that the stock market has predicted 9 out of the last 5 recessions. Finance pros also contend that the bond market is much smarter than the stock market. Case in point says the bond market elites is the shape of the yield curve. The indicator most industry observers pay close attention…

Until I read the book Shadow Divers: The True Story of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II I didn’t really know much about scuba diving. Sure, I tried it once in Mexico, but that was maybe 25-30 feet of water. The book tells an amazing story…

From the peak of the tech bubble in early 2000 the returns on the stock market have been underwhelming. In fact, if you line up the peak of the market in 2000 with the peak of the market in 1929 just before the stock market collapsed, the returns aren’t that far off:     Although…

There was a crazy story on Bloomberg this morning about an obscure hedge fund that is supposedly putting up some of the best performance numbers in the industry. I say supposedly because the numbers almost have to be false. You couldn’t read this story and come up with any other takeaway. In many ways, the…

A reader asks: I have a 36-year-old friend whose IRA—her only retirement savings—has about a 5% allocation to bonds, and a 95% allocation to equities. I’ve suggested that at her age, it’s time to double her bond allocation to 10%. Her husband (29 years old) disagrees, saying she has a long-enough horizon to stay nearly…

One of the more interesting finance stories to come out this week was the $1 billion buyout of the Dollar Shave Club by Unilever. Dollar Shave Club was founded in 2011 with some simple ideas — let’s sell low-cost razors to men by utilize some interesting marketing platforms and cut out all of the usual overhead that causes…

One of biggest lessons I learned early on in my career was the importance of asking questions. It took me a while, but I think being inquisitive is a great trait to have because the process of learning doesn’t have an end date. There is always more to learn. But I think you also have…

It’s now been more than seven years since the official end of the last recession. In that time investors have been inundated with double dip recession calls, tales of increased uncertainty and warnings of higher volatility. Everyone was so shell-shocked by the Great Recession that it became easy to assume that catastrophe and economic upheaval…

Spencer Jakab has a great new book out called Heads I Win, Tails I Win: Why Smart Investors Fail and How to Tilt the Odds in Your Favor.  Jakab is currently a columnist at the Wall Street Journal, but also spent part of his career as a sell side research analyst. The fact that he is…