Currency Prices are Efficient Too (and sometimes wrong)

28 Jun 2016

The Brexit has caused legions of analysts, economists, strategists and other pontificators to busily rework their assumptions about the world economy incorporating what seemed like an outside possibility last week to the new lay of the land. Markets fiercely incorporated their new assumptions into prices almost instantaneously – looking a chart of the British pound, you can see when the polls started to show that the Remain camp wasn’t a… Read More

REITs: An Asset Class or Just Another Sector?

23 Jun 2016

Back in March of last year, S&P and MSCI jointly announced that they would reorganize the Global Industry Classification Standards (GICS) so that REITs will be its own stand-alone sector instead of a component of financials. Most of the time, S&P and MSCI are competing index providers, but for reasons that I don’t know, they have worked together defining sectors (10), industry groups (24), industries (68) and sub-industries (156) around… Read More

Financial Times Recognizes Acropolis

16 Jun 2016

I am pleased to announce that for the second time, Acropolis has been named a top Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) by the Financial Times (FT). The FT starts by looking at firms with more than $300 million in assets under management, which is about 1,500 RIAs.  They invite firms to fill out a questionnaire and then evaluate the companies based on six key attributes: assets under management (AUM), asset growth,… Read More

Small Caps Simultaneously Over- and Under-Perform

03 Jun 2016

You may have noticed that the small cap index in the table above, the Russell 2000, has been gaining ground recently on the S&P 500, the benchmark index for large cap stocks. The chart below shows the return for the Russell 2000 (in orange) as nearly caught up with the S&P 500 (in blue).  The return difference, as we can see in the table is just one-third of one percent,… Read More