“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

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…

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…

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…

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:

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…

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…

“I’ve heard Warren say a half dozen times, ‘It’s not greed that drives the world, but envy.’” – Charlie Munger This experiment is fascinating: That little guy was perfectly happy doing his job and getting rewarded with cucumbers right up until the guy next door got a grape. This is one of my favorite experiments because…

Many investors have been operating under the assumption that we’re due for a market crash simply because stock returns have been so high over the past five years or so. The two large crashes we’ve experienced in this century alone have turned some forecasters into the financial prognosticator equivalent of Pavlov’s dogs.

Long-term government bonds have been on an absolute tear this year. The 20+ Year Treaury ETF (TLT) is up almost 20% on the year as interest rates have continued to drop.