7 Mar 2016

Employment Data Supports Stocks

Payrolls rose 242,000 last month versus consensus estimates of 195,000 and an upwardly revised 172,000 reading from January. The unemployment rate held steady at 4.9 percent while the U6 unemployment measure that includes workers who are part time purely for economic reasons, dropped to 9.7 percent – the low for this cycle. Average hourly earnings declined -0.1 percent versus expectations for a positive print of 0.2 percent.  On a year-over-year… Read More

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2 Mar 2016

Performance Transparency

We have another special posting from Michael Lissner today, who will be writing Daily Insights more regularly.  Also, there was a large typo yesterday, which said that we had traded $223.2 billion worth of stocks and ETFs.  Far from it: we traded $223.2 million in stocks and ETFs, which is still a lot, but less than what I wrote, which makes more sense given our $1.2 billion in assets under management…. Read More

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1 Mar 2016

The Inside Story on Trading Costs

Some things are easy to measure, like the internal costs of a mutual fund or exchange traded fund (ETF) or how much we spend in commissions at our custodian to buy or sell stocks, bonds, mutual funds and ETFs. It’s much harder to measure the market impact of your trading, or how much you pay as a price-taker (like us) between the price to buy a security (the offer) and how… Read More

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