A couple weeks I looked at the history of corrections in long-term U.S. treasury bonds. I received a few follow-up questions from people asking for the same information on intermediate bonds for a comparison between the different bond maturities from a risk perspective. The Barclays Aggregate Index, the industry standard for an intermediate bond benchmark,…
Is This the Top?
The Opportunity in Active ETFs
Last week on a trip to Philadelphia I had the chance to hangout with my friends at Alpha Architect to learn more about the ETF business from Wes Gray and his team. Here are a few takeaways:
Finding the Limitations in Your Investment Process
I attended a conference recently where one of the speakers was the head portfolio manager of legendary investor George Soros’s family office. This guy was good. He touched on nearly every hot button issue in the markets and the the economy. After giving his take on the state of the markets and where he was…
How Often Are Markets “Normal?”
Stock market prices are artificially high. Bond market yields are artificially low. Valuations are at unsustainable levels. It’s all paper gains that will be erased eventually. We need a more normalized environment. Investors and pundits have been hammering these points home for some time now. And there is some legitimacy to the idea that interest…
Liquidity Risk: Same as It Ever Was
For the past two to three years now I’ve read article after article about the potential for market dislocations during the next downturn because of liquidity issues in certain areas of the market. It’s now easier than ever to invest in almost any type of security or market you can think of through ETFs or…
Should You Use Volatility to Make Asset Allocation Decisions?
Fusion’s Felix Salmon got the dreaded pundit call-out this week for making a video telling people to sell their stocks in the after-math of the flash crash in 2010, as seen here:
The Shrinkage Effect in the Stock Market
There are a number of reasons cited for the fact that active fund managers have had a difficult time beating the markets over the years — higher costs, more trading activity, closet indexing, mis-timing the market, a shift to index funds and more highly-skilled investors, to name a few. Here’s another theory to add to…
How to Overcome Your Fear of Public Speaking
If you were to ask people what their biggest fear is, the list would usually include things like flying, spiders, heights, being confined in tight spaces, and even clowns. Yet one fear affects a majority of people more than anything else — public speaking. This is according to a number of different surveys that ask…
Experience or Expertise?
In the first episode of his new podcast, The Knowledge Project, Farnam Street’s Shane Parrish interviews Michael Mauboussin about a wide range of topics centered around the decision-making process. Mauboussin had some interesting things to say about the difference between experience and expertise: There is a great quote from Greg Northcraft, which I love, when…