I recently watched the movie Bridge of Spies with Tom Hanks. It was an excellent true story about a lawyer who was brokering deals for hostages with the Soviet Union during the Cold War in the 1950s. Hanks played the main character, James Donovan, who was tasked with the unenviable job of defending a Russian…

Elon Musk is one of those rare successful businessmen who has crossed over into pop culture because of his lifestyle and personality. Not only has the billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX been called the Thomas Edison of our day and age, but he has reached celebrity status as the inspiration for Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal…

The latest SPIVA numbers are out and once again it doesn’t look too pretty in terms of active management’s ability to outperform their benchmarks: The passive management revolution, the zero-sum nature of investing, the fact that markets are so competitive these days and the high cost of active management are the prime suspects for these…

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman introduces the concept of what you see is all there is (WYSIATI). WYSIATI occurs when people jump to conclusions based on limited information. In many aspects of life, rules of thumb can be helpful. There are times when you need to jump to conclusions based on a small amount of information…

There was a story in Bloomberg today about the University of California’s endowment fund and their latest moves to shake up the portfolio: The University of California’s endowment, which manages $2 billion in hedge fund investments, plans to pull money from the worst-performing managers and redirect assets to top firms, the state system’s investing chief…

“I’m only rich because I know when I’m wrong. I basically have survived by recognizing my mistakes.” – George Soros One of the best and worst things about the financial markets is that they’re never going to be perfect. There will always be something to worry about because even stability can breed instability. This is…

The last couple of years I have updated an asset allocation quilt that I keep track of through the end of each calendar year. For some reason I never got around to updating through the end of 2015 and was asked by a handful of readers to do so. Here’s the past 10 years’ worth…

After a number of years of poor performance Brazil’s stock market is on fire this year. Year to date, the Brazil ETF (EWZ) is up over 20%. Since the third week in January it’s up 44%. This is a massive move in a very short amount of time. Here are some of the other big…

A couple of years ago, Tadas Viskanta of Abnormal Returns asked myself and a handful of other bloggers the following question in his finance blogger wisdom series: Uber just raised VC monies at a $17 billion valuation. Are the private markets the new public markets? Is the average investor missing out on his/her inability to…

I received a huge response about my post from earlier this week where I showed that a 60/40 Vanguard portfolio beat the majority of college endowment funds over the previous 5 and 10 year periods. I’m always willing to see the other side of an argument, so I wanted to dig a little deeper into…