We’re roughly seven months into the year and people are already starting to talk about how certain investment styles don’t work anymore. In the financial world, people act like seven months is considered statistically significant because everyone assumes that short-term trends trump all. The proliferation of a wide variety of new ETFs and mutual funds…

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…

Energy stocks are the big loser this year as oil continues to get crushed. The SPDR Energy ETF (XLE) is down almost 14% while the S&P 500 is up over 11% in 2014. ETFs are widely considered to be the equivalent to an index fund, and in many ways they are, but it all depends…

Charlie Bilello from Pension Partners posted a great chart in a recent post:

“The wonderful thing about emerging markets is that they can get terribly cheap from time to time.” – William Bernstein The quilt above, courtesy of the Novel Investor, shows the annual performance numbers for the largest emerging market countries going back to the year 2000. Like any asset allocation quilt, it looks like complete chaos…

“The nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you’ll think it does. To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” – Charlie Munger A few months ago I wrote a post about the S&P 500 sector quilt which…

“There is no such thing as a perfect portfolio. We’ll only know what was perfect in retrospect. There is, however, a portfolio strategy that will meet your needs. It’s conceived from your financial situation, your understanding of risk, your time horizon and your desires.” – Rick Ferri MarketWatch columnist Brett Arends has been looking for…

“A great deal of data, and all my experience, tell me that the only thing we can predict about cycles is their inevitability.” – Howard Marks Howard Marks has the uncanny ability to take the complex topic of investing and translate the big picture ideas into simple terms. This is a rare trait in the…