One of the biggest reasons people run into financial troubles is because most hate talking about money or their financial blunders. It’s a taboo subject. But I’ve found that working in the investment industry makes it much easier for people to randomly talk to me about their finances. I like to compare it to those…

Morningstar’s Jeffrey Ptak shared some very insightful tweets from Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting this weekend: It’s estimated that more than 40,000 people pack the CenturyLink arena in Omaha to hear what Buffett and Munger have to say at the Woodstock of Capitalism. Every year I read about more and more value investing groups and panels…

After the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached the meaningless psychologically significant 1,000 point level in 1966, the market began to falter. During this correction Warren Buffett began to hear from a handful of the investors in his partnership who warned him that the market could decline even further. Buffett said that these predictions brought up two…

Brett Arends from MarketWatch has an interesting piece out this week that looks at the historical returns on the U.S. stock market. He goes through some research that shows some damning evidence about the long-term returns in U.S. stocks: Since 1982, for example, the stock market has gone up by an average of 6.5% a…

Over the past few years emerging market stocks have been dead weight in a diversified portfolio. From 2011-2014, the Vanguard Emerging Market ETF (VWO) had a total return of -7.98%. Four years and nothing to show for it. EM was basically left for dead by investors last year. According to Morningstar, investors pulled $5 billion from…

Here are some things you’ve probably been hearing during the current bull market from a wide range of investors including some tongue-in-cheek translations about what they really mean. On Fair Value: Bears: We think the market’s fair value is much lower than current levels. (Translation: We have to say it’s way lower than the level where…

In the latest edition of Stocks For the Long Run, Jeremy Siegel offered up a great stat on the small cap premium. From 1926-2012, small cap stocks returned 11.5% per year while the large cap S&P 500 returned 9.7%. But if you were to exclude the 1975-1983 period, which coincides with ERISA laws that made it easier…

Jason Zweig’s weekend column in the Wall Street Journal touched on an important issue that’s doesn’t get enough attention in the fund industry — closing a fund that has become too large to outperform. There’s a difficult trade-off between managing for outperformance and gathering assets (and fees) because at a certain point most strategies can’t scale…

Gustave Le Bon was a French psychologist who wrote The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind all the way back in 1895. The passage sums up his findings pretty well (emphasis mine): The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd is the following: Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their…

Like most professions, everything is not always as it appears in the finance industry. Here are a few truths you will rarely hear from anyone that works in finance.