Wes Gray and his asset management firm, Alpha Architect, recently launched their first ETF, called the ValueShares U.S. Quantitative Value ETF (ticker: QVAL). I had the chance to ask Wes some questions about a wide range of topics, including the fund’s strategy. My feeling is that ETFs are eventually going to take over the investment world, so…
Louis CK on Risk Management
“I never viewed money as being ‘my money.’ I always saw it as ‘the money’. It’s a resource. If it pools up around me then it needs to be flushed back out into the system.” – Louis CK
How To Win Any Argument About the Markets
It’s simple really. Just change the time horizon so it suits your stance.
Avoiding The Recency Bias in Foreign Stock Markets
“International diversification might not protect you from terrible days, months, or even years, but over longer horizons (which should be more important to investors) where underlying economic growth matters more to returns than short-lived panics, it protects you quite well.” – Cliff Asness
The Difference Between an Investment Firm and a Marketing Firm
I’m doing some research for a side project and came across an absolute gem from Jason Zweig that appeared in John Bogle’s book Common Sense on Mutual Funds. Here’s Zweig’s take on the difference between a marketing firm and an investment firm from an industry conference in 1997: Today, the question that you must decide…
Back-Testing The Tony Robbins All-Weather Portfolio
Tony Robbins has a new book out this week called MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom. The interviews that Robbins did with some of the greatest investors of all-time (Buffett, Dalio, Tudor-Jones, Ichan, Swensen, etc.) sound like they’re worth the price of admission alone. In a piece Robbins wrote for Yahoo Finance he…
Torturing Historical Market Data
Here are some other random thoughts on using historical market data when making investment decisions: There’s no such thing as right or wrong data, just better or worse. Stock market data looks spotless when you just see the performance numbers, but looks can be deceiving. There’s no way one can expect historical data to be all…
The Lollapalooza Effect in Active Management
Active management is having another dreadful year in 2014. Here are the results for U.S. stock funds through October, courtesy of Bank of America:
What Constitutes a Rich Life?
When I was in college, every spring a group of friends and I would go on a canoe trip on the Manistee River in the middle of nowhere in Northern Michigan. It was something of a last hurrah before school was out for the summer. During one of my final trips, after a long day…
“Speculation has always been a part of the market and always will be.”
It was the spring of 1976. Investors were still licking their wounds from the severe bear market of 1973-74. Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, an investment bank, was hosting a conference that matched two investing legends onstage at the same time — Ben Graham and Charles Ellis. Ellis, moderating a Q&A, asked Graham why the mid-1970s…