Over an 18 year period Bernie Madoff claimed to offer his investors annual returns of nearly 11%, not too far from the average long-term gains in the stock market. The crazy thing about Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme was not that he was offering outrageously high (fake) returns to his unwitting investors. It’s that he was offering…

“Hundreds of studies have shown that wherever we have sufficient information to build a model, it will perform better than most people.” – Daniel Kahneman Ray Dalio and Bill Ackman are arguably two of the greatest hedge fund managers in the business today. Last week they shared the stage at an investment conference to discuss…

There were a couple pieces of advice given in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal that I thought deserved a closer look. First up, Bank of America is recommending dividend stocks as a fixed income substitute because bonds yields are so low:

In a piece for Slate last week, Helaine Olen took the financial industry to task for their continued push to make financial literacy a priority. She pulled no punches:

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…

Esquire is the only print magazine I still subscribe to. They always seem to have a good cover story, usually an interview with a big movie star. I base my reaction about the movie star on one question: Would I want to have a beer with this person? In the most recent interview from the…

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…

The trend towards passive investments continues to gain steam as more investors are opting for lower cost fund options. See this chart from Morningstar via Victor Reklaitis of MarketWatch:

“Spend extravagantly on the things you love, but cut costs mercilessly on the things you don’t.” – Ramit Sethi This past week I was watching the news and they showed the obligatory story on the $400+ million Powerball lottery.  There were the standard interviews with people buying tickets at gas stations and 7-11. What would…

I love using analogies to explain complex ideas. It’s a great way to make boring or difficult topics more relatable and easily understood. But when you read as much financial information as I do you start to see some repetition in the analogies used to describe the markets and financial planning. I’m not saying most…