One of the reasons the past couple of years have frustrated so many professional investors is because of the lack of volatility. For most investors, volatility is a four letter word that should be avoided at all costs. But for others, volatility acts as a form of opportunity.
Q&A With Alpha Architect’s Wes Gray: Part II
If you missed part I of my Q&A with Wes Gray of Alpha Architect, check it out here for thoughts on his firm’s new ETF, the process of starting an ETF and more on quantitative value investing. Part II includes some of Gray’s biggest influences on his investment philosophy and lessons learned from serving our…
Q&A With Alpha Architect’s Wes Gray: Part I
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:
