In finance, the value of any asset is the present value of all of the future cash flows. When someone first told me that, I had no idea what it meant, so let’s run through a quick example. Assume that someone asks you to borrow $100 for one year. If you think inflation might be three percent in the next year, you’re going to need to charge a three percent… Read More
Many readers know that I have two grade school daughters because I’ve written about them in the context of saving for college. Like any parent, I want smart money kids. While this is a common goal among parents, it’s easy to say and much more difficult to actually accomplish in practice. There was an article in the New York Times over the weekend that described a guy who withdrew his monthly… Read More
January was a tough month for value stocks, as the S&P 500 Value index fell by -4.57 percent compared to the S&P 500 index, which lost -3.00 percent. When stocks have a tough month, it’s axiomatic that mutual fund managers who invest in stocks also had a hard time. That was particularly true for one well-known value investor, Bruce Berkowitz, manager of the Fairholme Fund (FAIRX), which lost -9.83 percent… Read More
Yesterday, I wrote that the yield on the 30-year US Treasury closed at an all time low at 2.25 percent. I also wrote that the yield on the 10-year was 2.66 percent, which was completely wrong: it closed at 1.66 percent on Friday, I simply made a fat fingered mistake – sorry. This mistake notwithstanding, I was struck by the two yields because the all-time record-low yield on the 10-year… Read More
There are only a handful of index providers globally and their intense competition breeds some very interesting innovation. Recently, one of the large providers, MSCI, launched a series of indexes that attempt to reflect the performance of companies based on their economic exposure rather than the location of their headquarters. When indexes were first created, most companies economic reach didn’t expand much beyond their own borders. Today, however, businesses are… Read More
Maybe I’m a little hung-up on this, but I am always a little annoyed when institutional investors look down their noses on retail investors. When a bull market is finally getting going, you’ll hear them sniff that ‘retail is finally waking up,’ or when markets are falling, they’ll say that the losses are exaggerated because retail is selling into the downturn. No matter what markets are doing, institutional investors seem… Read More
A friend recently forwarded me the address of a fascinating investment website that I have spent hours studying. The site, found here, beautifully displays market forecasts for stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies from around the world. This site is run by Research Affiliates, an investment research firm that develops indexes and strategies that other investment managers license. They say that as of the end of the third quarter last year,… Read More
It should be no surprise that small cap stocks struggled last year compared to large cap stocks. While the S&P 500 enjoyed above average results earning 13.7 percent, the Russell 2000 index of small cap stocks only gained 4.9 percent (click here for a chart of major asset class results). A little more than a year ago, I wrote that there is a long-running debate in academia about whether small… Read More
When the Swiss National Bank (SNB) broke their peg to the euro, the Swiss franc shot up 17 percent overnight. Investors that owned Swiss francs had a fantastic return and those that had bet against the franc, or gone short francs, lost an equivalent amount (more details here). That shock caused several currency brokers around the world to fold, although the biggest firm, FXCM managed to stay afloat thanks to… Read More
Last year was tough for some of our stock strategies. For example, we take a portion of our large cap portfolio and invest in ‘value’ stocks. Another, equally sized percentage is invested in a strategy that buys ‘momentum’ stocks. I’m going to oversimplify here, but value stocks can be thought of as ‘cheap’ stocks. For a stock to be cheap, the market value of a company has to be low… Read More
