20 May 2014

Investors Keep Chasing Performance

One of the ways that investors hurt themselves is by chasing performance.  Unfortunately, many financial services organizations enable this practice by focusing on short-term performance. Recently, I saw some data that showed flows into mutual funds and exchange traded funds (ETFs) based on their Morningstar star rating. The chart is self-explanatory except for the columns labeled NR, which means ‘Not Rated.’  To earn a Morningstar star rating, you need at… Read More

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19 May 2014

The State of Housing

A few weeks ago when Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen testified before Congress, she said that ‘readings on housing activity, a sector that has been recovering since 2011, have remained disappointing so far this year and will bear watching.’ Since the World War II, residential housing activity has been about 4.75 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).  During the bubble that hare increased to about 6.4 percent, cratered to two… Read More

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14 May 2014

Treasury Bonds Mystery

Yesterday, someone asked me what’s going on in the markets.  I said that stocks are flopping around zero – plus two percent or minus two percent depending on what you look at, nothing really.  I said that the interesting story, in my opinion, was that the yield on bonds has been dropping all year, much to everyone’s surprise. When I hung up the phone, I looked up the yield and… Read More

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14 May 2014

Dogs of the Dow

The first investment strategy that I can remember hearing about is the Dogs of the Dow strategy. One of my parent’s friends, who knew I was interested in stocks back in high school, told me one of the ‘secrets’ to beating the market. The strategy is fairly simply: start with the 30 stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) and sort them by their dividend yield.  Buy the 10… Read More

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12 May 2014

IRA Rollover Rule Changes

I am a little embarrassed to admit that there are so many rules about IRAs that I find it difficult to keep them straight and I have to refer back to a guide that I have and constantly have to ask other Acropolitans if I’ve got my facts straight.  There are a lot of rules, even more exceptions and getting it wrong can be costly. A recent IRS ruling highlighted… Read More

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28 Apr 2014

The Trouble with College Savings

As loyal readers know, I am a big fan of 529 savings plans and am a Missouri Most customer on behalf of my two grade school aged daughters. I was reminded of why a high quality education is so important: on average, the unemployment rate declines as education levels increase and incomes increase. The chart shows that for those who didn’t finish high school, the unemployment rate is 11 percent… Read More

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22 Apr 2014

It’s Easy to Beat the Market

I love Robert Shiller.  He’s a Yale professor that’s really shaped my thinking on how to value the stock market with the Shiller PE, he wrote a book called Irrational Exuberance at the peak of the technology bubble and he won the Nobel Prize in Economics last year for his efforts in showing that markets aren’t as efficient as the other Nobel Prize winner, Gene Fama, would suggest. Last week,… Read More

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21 Apr 2014

The Truth About Global Growth

Legendary investor Peter Lynch once said that if you spend 13 minutes per year on economics, you’ve wasted 10 minutes. Although I spend more than three minutes per year looking at economic data, I do tend to look a lot less than others in the industry.  Many years ago, I saw a study that showed that the connection between gross domestic product (GDP) and stock market returns were lowly correlated,… Read More

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17 Apr 2014

PIMCOs Star System Goes Awry

Yesterday, I came back from lunch and found the most recent Bloomberg Business Week on my keyboard so that I couldn’t possibly miss it.  The cover features a confused and slightly incredulous Bill Gross, the Chief Investment Officer (CIO) of PIMCO and general bond king with the headline, ‘Am I really Such a Jerk?’

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16 Apr 2014

Are Small Caps Expensive?

The recent underperformance of small cap stocks has me wondering whether the outperformance that small cap stocks has enjoyed over the last decade could be coming to a close. Over the last ten years, the S&P 500 has gained 7.16 percent and the S&P 600 Small Cap Index has earned 9.81 percent a year, an outperformance of 2.65 percent per year.

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