One of the easiest ways to build a larger audience as a blogger is to have someone who has already made it link to your work or recommend your material to their readers. You can also get a sense of who the most respected people are based on how loyal their readership is because of…

Institutional investors are often referred to as the ‘smart money’ or ‘sophisticated investors.’ For some funds this is true, but many of these large pools of capital make the same exact mistakes as mom and pop retail investors. It’s just that the reasons are different. Here are a few studies to consider: One study looked…

I’ve got a few conferences I’ll be attending in the coming months, so I thought it would be a good time to review the etiquette and unwritten rules for conference attendees. Here are my top ten, in no particular order: 1. Never ask a question right before lunch or cocktail hour. This one should be fairly…

We’re well into the seventh year of an economic and stock market recovery. The economic expansion hasn’t been as robust as many would like and the recovery has been uneven, as some have fared better than others in the aftermath of the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression. But you can’t deny that things…

One of the reasons so many people have such a difficult time with their finances is because they come into the process with faulty assumptions. There are unrealistic and ill-informed expectations that set people back from the start.

“What is the reward of being right, benchmarked against the cost of being wrong?” – David Rosenberg For a number of years David Rosenberg was one of the top dogs at one of the largest, most well-known firms on Wall Street. As he told Barry Ritholtz on a recent episode of Masters in Business, it…

Investors have a habit of thinking in terms of extremes. Active or passive. All-in the markets or all-out. Stocks are either topping out or about to bottom. Markets are perfectly efficient or wildly inefficient. It’s much easier to go to the extreme viewpoints because it acts as something of a mental shortcut. The brain is constantly…

As I’ve stated in the past, one of the hardest things to do in all of finance is predict the direction and magnitude of interest rate movements. The variables involved are seemingly endless. The chart above shows interest rates over the past 225 years. Many use this historical construct to build their forward-looking interest rate…

Since the financial crisis the flows into passively managed funds have caused many in the industry to predict that we’re in an index fund bubble. I think too many people throw around the term ‘bubble’ without considering what an actual bubble is, but it’s quite possible they’re looking in the wrong place. Private investments have quietly…

I shared a statistic in my last post that received a fair amount of questions and scrutiny from readers (see: Playing the Probabilities). Namely, that the worst 30 year total return on the S&P 500 was close to 850%. When investors see a number this large the first reaction for many is disbelief. I’m always…