It’s been forever and a day since the Fed last raised rates so I keep seeing headlines or hear people say some variation of the following: There’s a huge group of young traders and investors who have NEVER lived through a rising rate environment. There are other examples people use as well — a highly inflationary…

A couple months ago I wrote a post on Gary Antonacci’s book, Dual Momentum, and received a ton of questions and reader feedback on his absolute and relative momentum trend-following rules. I’ve been meaning to write a follow-up.

“There’s only one absolute truth about investing…it isn’t easy.” – Howard Marks Investing is hard. Markets are extremely challenging. Beating the market is not easy. Coming to these realizations is maybe the hardest part about investing because we all like to assume that we’re above average. Case in point — a few years ago MarketWatch columnist…

Last week a received a call from a reporter from VICE named Allie Conti, who is setting out on a journey to learn about managing money. Like many of her fellow Millennials, Ms. Conti doesn’t have much experience with the markets, investing or even general personal finance: I never learned about “mutual funds” or “index…

When markets are rising, professional money managers typically feel terrible about their performance when they’re trailing their peers or their benchmark. They’re still making money mind you, but just not as much as everyone else is making.

U.S. stocks were up nearly 400% in the 1980s. All anyone remembers is the 1987 crash. Bonds gave investors a total return of more than 100% in the 1990s. All anyone ever talks about is the 1994 crash when interest rates spiked. Emerging market stocks were up 185% in the 1990s. Yet we continue to…

This week I had lunch with my first boss who gave me my start in the investment business. I learned a lot from him in my first few years and it’s amazing how often I go back to some of the basic principles he taught me.

There’s a great scene in the movie Ex Machina where genius inventor Nathan describes how he was able to crack the code for creating artificial intelligence in a robot. (Not sure if this is a spoiler alert, but if you haven’t seen the movie yet and want to go in blind, skip this next paragraph.)…

Risk-adjusted return measures have been around for some time now, but following the financial crisis professional money managers and asset allocators zeroed in on these formulaic performance metrics like never before. One of the most well-known risk-adjusted return formulas, the Sharpe Ratio, is simple a measure of return per unit of risk. It takes the annual…

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…