“I never viewed money as being ‘my money.’ I always saw it as ‘the money’.  It’s a resource. If it pools up around me then it needs to be flushed back out into the system.” – Louis CK

“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

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:

“The way we traditionally conceive of ignorance—as an absence of knowledge—leads us to think of education as its natural antidote. But education can produce illusory confidence.” – David Dunning I have to imagine that having a behavioral bias named after your work is one of the highlights of the psychology profession (the Nobel prize isn’t…

The best thing I read this week comes from Bob Maynard, CIO of the $14.2 billion Idaho Public Pension Plan. Maynard’s entire approach is based on the premise that increased complexity is failing professional investors. Instead of fighting complex markets with complex strategies, Maynard favors a simpler approach, as he states in a write-up for…

Forbes has an excellent profile out on DoubleLine’s Jeffrey Gundlach. The entire piece is worth a read since Gundlach is not only one of the most respected investors out there today but he’s also very outspoken and entertaining. There was one part of the interview that I thought was interesting as it relates to the…

Last week I looked at some of the options available to bond investors in a low rate world. I showed that subsequent returns over the next decade tend to track the current interest rate level very closely. Here’s that graph again from the Wall Street Journal:

“Financial advisors frame themselves as investment managers, providers of “beat-the-market” pills, when, in truth, they are mostly managers of investors.” – Meir Statman In my opinion, managing your emotions is by far the most important aspect of managing money. For a number of reasons – time, lack of expertise or lack of willpower – it…

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece this morning about the recent “bloodbath” in performance for a handful of hedge funds.