Jennifer Ablan of Reuters has been all over the interesting happenings in the fight for bond manager supremacy between Bill Gross and Jeffrey Gundlach. She recently interviewed DoubleLine’s Gundlach and posed an important question about the size of the firm. Specifically, now that DoubleLine manages over $60 billion, Ablan asked him about future growth plans for…
The Danger of One Year Performance Numbers
“Investment wisdom begins with the realization that long-term returns are the only ones that matter.” – William Bernstein Now that 2014 is in the books, I’m starting to see the usual flood of annual performance reviews to show what worked and what didn’t. I’ll save you some time – U.S. large cap stocks and long-term…
Updating My Favorite Performance Chart
There’s a well-known story about how Daniel Kahneman got his start in the study of behavioral psychology a number of decades ago. The story goes like this: Kahneman was asked to help study the performance of pilots in the Israeli air force. The flight instructors were trying to figure out what to do about their…
The 2014 Financial Market Awards
The votes have been tallied. Here are the financial market award-winners for 2014: Comeback Player of the Year: Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) After a very minimal gain in 2013, REITs are up almost 32% this year. Lifetime Achievement Award: Warren Buffett Remember when Buffett was finished and couldn’t be expected to outperform anymore? People…
Genius Must Be Proven
Wouldn’t life be much less stressful if the markets were easy? What if you could have completely rotated out of financial stocks in 2007 before they got absolutely destroyed in the financial crisis? Or gone to cash just before Lehman Brothers almost brought down the entire financial system in 2008? Or sidestepped just about every…
How to Spot a Bad Forecaster
“One might wonder if forecasters eventually get bored with being utterly wrong and would like to give up guessing the future.” – James Montier
Putting Passive Inflows Into Context
John Authers from the Financial Times had a great story last weekend on state of the fund management industry. This chart garnered a lot of discussion on social media:
One of the Worst Arguments in Finance
“In the stock market, value standards don’t determine prices; prices determine value standards.” – Benjamin Graham
The Best Books I Read in 2014
These were my favorite books I read in 2014. Finance/Business/Investing Young Money by Kevin Roose Roose did an amazing job capturing the current sentiment about two things I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about – the finance industry and Millennials. He spent a number of years interviewing the anonymous young subjects that…
Buffett and Munger on How to be a Hack
“I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have figured out. I don’t believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody’s that smart.” – Charlie Munger I have a confession to make — I’m a hack. That’s right. I’m consistently stealing ideas from people who…