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…

Top quartile private equity performance is something every institutional fund aspires to. Of course, every single PE fund claims to be top quartile, which would seem to be mathematically impossible. David Swensen and his team at Yale have put together one of the most enviable track records in this space. This passage comes from the…

One of the biggest problems with the way many financial firms operate is that they prescribe before they diagnose. They first create a product or portfolio and then try to convince people to invest in it. They try to make a sale without first gaining an understanding of their potential client’s circumstances. It’s completely backwards….

Josh Kaufman, author of the book The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business, had a great post recently on what he call strategic apathy. Some highlights: In my essay on Status Malfunction, we discussed the problem of allowing the promise of social status to warp our decision-making. We didn’t discuss the solution: making a conscious, deliberate…

All eyes are on the Fed this week as everyone is focused on whether or not they’ll finally raise short-term interest rates. The game of will they/won’t they has been playing out for some time now as it’s been nearly a decade since the Fed last raised their benchmark Fed Funds Rate.

“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…

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.

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…

“60% of the time, it works every time.” – Brian Fantana

The Barclays Aggregate Index is basically the S&P 500 of the bond markets. Formerly the Lehman Brothers Aggregate Index before 2008 (you can thank Dick Fuld for that), the Barclays Agg is the bond index that all total U.S. bond market index funds are benchmarked to for tracking purposes. The biggest bond fund in the…