In the past two weeks, I’ve written primers on two of the strategies that we use, over-weighting to small cap stocks and investing in cheap, value stocks. One of the Portfolio Managers here at Acropolis correctly reminded me that all of the best strategy in the world can be undone with poor investor behavior, so I thought I would try and put some numbers on that idea. To demonstrate how… Read More
Value investing is perhaps the oldest and best-known investment strategy, which basically suggests that cheap stocks tend to outperform expensive ones. The strategy was first popularized by Benjamin Graham, teacher and mentor to Warren Buffett, who also co-wrote one of the most important books in finance, Security Analysis, with David Dodd in 1934. Graham introduced the idea that stocks have an ‘intrinsic’ value that can be roughly estimated with a… Read More
When my wife and I got married more than 15 years ago, we had a lot of things in common including the fact that we had both inherited stock in GE. In fact, it was about 10 percent of our combined net worth. I don’t remember the exact numbers anymore, but the cost basis on the stock was low for both of us because each of us had separately… Read More
For the most part, the returns associated with foreign stocks and bonds have two components: the return of the stock or bond and, secondly, the return of the foreign currency. Over the past eight months, the impact of the exchange rate has been unusually high. For example, a German investor that owns an index fund in the DAX is up 24.04 percent so far this year through yesterday. For… Read More
I’ve had the feeling recently that stocks were more volatile than usual. As funny as this may sound, I don’t trust my own gut at all. Despite its size, my gut is no better than anyone else’s at creating hunches that are worth a darn, so I turn to data frequently. To address my intuition, I did a quick check of the average volatility for the first quarter compared to… Read More
In recent weeks, I’ve written about the various risk premiums that have been found in academia that both explain returns and offer some hope of beating the market. Each time, I wished that I could link back to an article that explains the concept more fully, so today, I am going to write the first of a series of articles explaining the well-known risk premiums. First up is the size… Read More
One way to judge the performance of a mutual fund or ETF is to compare the results to a relevant benchmark, which is usually an index that has relatively similar characteristics. Another method is to compare your fund to a group of funds that are basically pursuing the same strategy. Admittedly, we don’t use this approach very often, even though I think it would make our job a lot easier… Read More
The most recent issue of Bloomberg Markets magazine featured a photo of a stately gentleman with a blazing headline that read, ‘This Fund Manager Has Consistently Beaten the S&P 500 for 40 Years.’ The article highlights the performance of The Nicholas Fund (ticker: NICSX), a $3.6 billion mutual fund run by Albert Nicholas, who started the fund in 1969. The article says that he has outperformed the S&P 500 by… Read More
Even though I was out of town last week on vacation, I generally keep my ear to the ground for market news and last week that was especially true because the Fed was expected to move one step closer to raising interest rates. For at least a year, the Fed has maintained that they would be ‘patient’ about the timing of raising rates. I assumed, like most people, that the… Read More
It should not come as a surprise to anyone that markets have performed very well over the past five years. The S&P 500 has earned 16.12 percent per year in the five years that ended in February. Few investors realize that corporate bonds have also done very well over the past five years. For the five years that ended in February, the Barclays US Corporate Bond index has earned 6.22… Read More
