The hedge fund industry has had no shortage of bad press in the past few years. High fees, high profile flameouts and generally awful returns have been none to kind to the once masters of the finance universe. This past month has given hedge funds yet another black-eye as well-known and highly respected Visium Asset Management…

There’s a piece in the New York Times today which posits that the cycle may be turning in Silicon Valley. Well-known venture capitalists such as Chamath Palihapitiya and Bill Gurley are cited as those who have been tempering expectations for the tech industry. Here’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus what’s been driving things lately: What has driven inflated…

As I stated last week, ETFs are a wonderful product innovation for the individual investor. However, most people don’t realize that ETFs were actually created for institutional investors. Those who are worried about passive investing taking over the markets point to the $3 trillion or so in ETFs as their main point of contention. In The…

ETFs are one of the greatest financial product inventions investors have ever seen. They’re low-cost, tax-efficient and transparent. Maybe best of all they’re extremely convenient, offering diversified or niche strategies that would have been nearly impossible for most investors to put together themselves in the past. Investors have taken notice based on the fact that…

I’m a huge fan of the WTF podcast from Marc Maron. Maron has an uncanny ability to get celebrities to open up on both personal and professional matters. In a recent episode he was talking to actor Jason Bateman, who’s one of my favorite comedic actors (Arrested Development, Bad Words, Juno, etc.). Bateman plays the…

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…