11
Mar
2016
Active Funds Still Struggle
Every six months, Standard & Poor’s does an analysis of how active funds compare to S&P indexes and it’s been a while since I’ve reported on the results. Unfortunately for the actively managed funds community, things haven’t gotten any better since my last update. The report offers many details and if you want to look at the entire report, click here. I think that if you aren’t going to look at… Read More
10
Mar
2016
King of Wall Street Remembered
I read a newsletter on and off that always features an obituary. I know a lot of people read them every day, but I find that a little depressing. I wrote about David Bowie’s passing back in January, and at the risk of writing too many obits, I thought I would note the death of John Gutfreund yesterday, who was dubbed the King of Wall Street by BusinessWeek magazine. Gutfreund… Read More
9
Mar
2016
Naming Names on Broker Misconduct
When we started this business more than 13 years ago, I maintained a scrapbook of article clippings that I called “The Big Book of Broker Misdeeds.” At the time, we were coming out of the tech wreck and there were tons of articles about how brokers steered widows and orphans into unsuitable hot technology funds during the bubble years that blew apart when they fell back to earth. I know a… Read More
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
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
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
29
Feb
2016
Applied Investment Rigor
Barron’s cover article this weekend featured AQR, one of the fund companies that we use. You can find the article here, but a subscription is required. The article was great, really explaining the firm and many of their processes – so much so that one of the online commenters asked, ‘what is this, an ad?’ My only disappointment was that the article really highlighted their alternative mutual funds, strategies like managed futures… Read More
26
Feb
2016
Is Value Investing Dead?
Value stocks are undoubtedly having a tough time these days. As I first wrote last November (click here for the article), value stocks are undergoing their worst period of underperformance since the tech bubble during the late 1990s. For the 10 years ending January 31st, the Russell 1000 Value index is up 7.03 percent compared to 7.92 percent for the Russell 1000 index of large cap stocks and 8.68 percent… Read More
25
Feb
2016
Another Year of the Bump
When I first took over Daily Insights, I wrote an article entitled ‘The Year of the Bump,’ which was about several of the Acropolitans that were having kids that year. Unfortunately, I wrote that article before our current website, so it isn’t online, but I thought about that in a meeting today. We were visited by representatives from Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA) and our primary contact said that he and… Read More
24
Feb
2016
An Unusual Energy IPO
I’ll bet that when you think of IPOs, or initial public offerings, you think of hot tech stocks like Facebook, Tesla or GoPro (granted, some of these stocks are a little less hot these days). I do too, so I was a little surprised to read in the Wall Street Journal that the biggest IPO this year is essentially a blank check for what is known as a Special Purpose… Read More