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Not A Stock Picker’s Market. Again.

ETF

At the end of 2014, Tom Lee, co-founder and head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors, explained why only about one out of five actively managed funds were able to outperform their benchmark index that year, and why he believed that 2015 could be huge for stock pickers. In fact, “2015 should be a very…

Investor Lessons From 2015

ETF

Every year, the market provides us with important lessons on the prudent investment strategy. Many times, the market will offer investors remedial courses, covering lessons that it has already delivered in previous years. That’s why one of my favorite sayings is that there’s nothing new in investing; there is only investment history you don’t yet…

More 2015 Investor Lessons

ETF

Earlier this week, we began discussing 10 important lessons that the markets taught us in 2015 about the prudent investment strategy. In lessons one through three, we explored active management as a loser’s game, the “conventional wisdom” about the correlation between the economy and the stock market, and the “Sell in May” myth. Today we’ll…

Hedge Funds Miss Mark

ETF

Hedge funds began 2015 coming off their sixth-straight year of trailing U.S. stocks (as measured by the S&P 500 Index) by significant margins. And for the 10-year period ending 2014, one that included the worst bear market in the post-Depression era, the HFRX Global Hedge Fund Index returned just 0.7% per year, underperforming every single…

Is It Time to Raise Cash?

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal contained a headline that very likely frightened many investors — and in my opinion, that’s precisely what it was meant to do. Otherwise, why inform investors that “U.S. public pension plans and mutual funds are sheltering more of their holdings in cash than they have in years,…

Final Investor Lessons From 2015

ETF

So far, we’ve covered seven important lessons that the market taught investors in 2015 about the prudent investment strategy. These lessons, some of which repeat year after year, have addressed active management as a loser’s game; the correlation between the stock market and the economy; the “Sell in May” myth; fear about inflation; the mistake…

Saying No, So You Can Say Yes When It Matters

New York Times

I have a problem: It’s really hard for me to say no to new, exciting projects. If you’re doing creative work at all (and I’m using this term very broadly, so that should mean just about everybody), then you’ve probably run into this problem yourself. There are endless options for how you could spend your…

Does Firing Money Managers Lead to Improved Performance?

Leonard Kostovetsky and Jerold Warner, the authors of the study You’re Fired! New Evidence on Portfolio Manager Turnover and Performance, which was published in the August 2015 issue of the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, contribute to the literature on the performance of money managers by examining managerial turnover at both internally managed mutual…

Why Investors Need to Embrace Bear Markets

Wall Street Journal

Suppose you had a friend whose lifelong dream was to travel overseas. But this friend was deathly afraid of experiencing turbulence on an airplane. So he decided to forgo his trip until a new plane was invented, one able to guarantee with absolute certainty that passengers would never feel turbulence. You might be thinking, “Good…

Private Equity Not Worth Fees

ETF

The headline of a December article in The New York Times declared: “Private Equity Fees Are Sky-High, Yes, but Look at Those Returns.” The author, Steven Davidoff Solomon, was making the case that while “critics love to complain about private equity and its exorbitant fees … as an asset class and with the right fund,…

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