Manisha Thakor brings Buckingham’s Steve Weiss on the MoneyZen Podcast to discuss some of the ins and outs of Social Security. Manisha Thakor brings Buckingham’s Steve Weiss on the MoneyZen Podcast to discuss some of the ins and outs of Social Security, including strategies for claiming benefits and optimizing them to fit your life and financial…
Feedback on investment decisions helps improve investor performance: Larry Swedroe unpacks the research. It’s been well documented that, on average, retail investors are “dumb” money. For example, on average, the stocks they buy go on to underperform, and the stocks they sell go on to outperform. Sadly, investors even manage to underperform the very mutual…
Turns out the “smart money” often isn’t. Larry Swedroe on who, exactly, exploits market anomalies. Institutional investors are generally considered “smart money” that exploits the behavioral biases of “dumb” retail money. However, there have been some holes poked in that idea recently. For instance, Roger Edelen, Ozgur Ince and Gregory Kadlec, authors of the study…
Larry Swedroe compiles his list of financial predictions to watch for the year. Every year, I like to keep track of the predictions “gurus” and other market observers make for the upcoming year, specifically the ones they say are “sure things.” It seems like no one in the financial media holds them accountable (which is…
For some, fiduciary is just a headline. For us, “It’s who we are.” The word fiduciary has been in the news a lot of late, from Wall Street to Washington, but it’s a word that has always been part of our daily dialogue. Advisors who act as fiduciaries, as we do, are legally required to put the…
Diseconomies of scale and their impact on active manager performance. There is a large body of overwhelming evidence that past performance is at best a poor predictor of active managers’ future performance. That is why the SEC requires that common and familiar disclaimer. There are many explanations for the difficulty that active managers face in…
Manisha Thakor talks about joyful work and finances with Gur Tsabar.
Larry Swedroe surveys the benefits and drawbacks of the rise of ETFs.
Retirement readiness in America: Manisha Thakor and Catherine Collinson of TCRStudies unpack the risks and trends.
Socially responsible investing (SRI) has been referred to as “double-bottom-line” investing. The implication is that you are seeking not only profitable investments, but also investments that meet your personal standards. Faith-Based Funds (FBF) can be viewed as a subset of SRI. While SRI applies screens on secular social concerns, FBF screens investments based on the…
Whether they go by such names as “unconstrained,” “tactical asset allocation,” “absolute return,” or “go anywhere,” Wall Street touts the advantages of funds that have the freedom to shift asset allocations to wherever they see the best opportunities. It certainly sounds appealing. And investors must believe these funds have advantages as the number of such…
While embarking on scenic tours can make life both interesting and exciting, they’re best avoided when it comes to the world of investing. The reason is that most “interesting” investments fail to deliver on their promise of returns sufficient to compensate for their incremental risks. This has been especially true of hedge funds. And it…
There’s an interesting paper from Martijn Cremers, a professor of finance at the University of Notre Dame, on the performance of emerging market stocks that are the publicly traded affiliates of multinational companies. But like so much in the world of investing, Cremers’ findings, while certainly alluring, need to be examined closely before investors jump into…
Last year certainly provided active managers with plenty of opportunities to outperform, and it’s worth examining if they really did. For example, while the S&P 500 Index returned 32.4 percent, Netflix (NLFX), the top performer in the index, returned 297 percent. Two other stocks, Micron Technology (MU) and Best Buy Co. (BBY) returned more than…
The most common misconception among investors may be the value of investing in dividend-paying stocks. Almost every week, someone contacts me to extol the virtues of investing in what they call “high quality, dividend-yielding securities.” Often, their interest is spurred by the recent high performance of these stocks. According to one paper by Gregg S. Fisher, published…
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