The number of publicly listed companies in the U.S. has fallen steadily since 1997. More companies have delisted, in fact, than gone public in every year of the past 20 years except one, 2013. Put another way, the pool is getting smaller even while the population and economy are expanding.
Most investors believe that all passively managed funds in the same asset class are virtual substitutes for one another. The result is that, when choosing a specific fund, their sole focus is on its expense ratio. That is a mistake for a wide variety of reasons. The first is that expense ratios are not a mutual fund’s only expense.
We don’t know how long ago we met Frederick “Shad” Rowe, but we are glad we did, because our conversations with him have been net worth changing.
It is no secret that the U.S. stock market has been completely addicted to discounting the future success of the most popular technology stocks. Momentum-based growth investing has had many bouts of success in the past, but this is the first episode in an era where indexed mutual funds and exchange traded funds (ETFs) were the largest aggregate owners of the largest capitalization companies.
Stock indexes have been able to move higher as the balancing act between economic growth and investor concerns continues—but how long will it last?
The decade after the financial crisis has been marked by low inflation and investment spending, lagging income growth and a strong U.S. dollar. We expect these trends to reverse direction and potentially surprise investors who aren't prepared.
A landmark study looked back at more than 100 years of data and 23 countries to determine if there are reasons to believe the cross-sectional patterns in factor returns will persist, or whether they were just anomalies that tended to disappear after publication.
“Do you have the mental fortitude to accept huge gains?” is a line from The Elliott Wave Theorist’s Robert Prechter in an era gone by. But it is as true today as it was when first penned in the 1970s. And to do that, one has to ignore the ticker and hold stocks through a long market swing.
Turkish asset prices have plummeted this year, bringing their valuations to historically low levels. That presents potentially attractive opportunities to investors looking for quality stocks at bargain-basement prices. Yet some selloffs don’t necessarily end with stocks and bonds at oversold levels if their prices largely reflect current or near-term risks, both company specific and macroeconomic.
Last week I gave you some rules to follow with your investments. They were necessarily general because I’m writing to a broad audience. Today, I will get more specific by discussing some possible strategies for high-net-worth “accredited investors.”
Meet Juan León – a key member of the U.S. Global Investors’ investment team. Juan is responsible for researching companies, sectors and industries, in addition to constructing new investment strategies for several of the firm’s mutual funds and ETFs.
Geopolitics dominates the news these days, over-shadowing what remains a fundamentally solid global economy. As always, Donald Trump is at the center of most of the “noise”...
Readers of these missives know that we have been favorable on the midstream Master Limited Partnership (MLP) space for a number of months. The reasons for that strategy have often been mentioned in these letters. First, the midstream MLPs sold off when the upstream MLPs blew up with most of them going bankrupt.
For industry veterans, annuities conjure the “bad old days” of pushy insurance companies offering rich commissions to snake-oil salesmen with Rolex-knockoffs peeking out from French cuffs.
C. Thomas Howard, PhD, is the CEO and chief investment officer at AthenaInvest, Inc., a Colorado-based investment manager. He is the co-manager of the Athena Global Tactical ETFs, a separately managed account. As of June 30, 2018, since its inception in September 2010, it has had an annualized return of 19.0%, outperforming its benchmark, the MSCI All Country World Index (ACWI) by 900 basis points. It is rated five-stars by Morningstar.
With stints at firms such as Hightower and United Capital, Todd Eklund has worked with some of the largest RIA firms. Having seen and observed some of what works and what doesn’t in the advisor space, I thought his perspective would be valuable to RIA firms considering outsourcing to a TAMP.
Anticipate before you participate in the market. This is a classic piece of advice I like to give investors and have written about extensively in my CEO blog, Frank Talk. Financial markets are influenced by relatively predictable cycles and trading patterns, and by better understanding these we are able to react thoughtfully to headline noise or unexpected market developments.
For much of this recovery and expansion, many have opined that this economic cycle would ultimately end very differently than those of the past. We have resisted this narrative and instead explained our belief that this cycle will indeed follow the same path and end like all others.
In a narrow market, pruning a growth-oriented portfolio can be challenging given market leaders’ prominence in benchmark indexes. I believe that’s why we’re seeing unusual responses to earnings announcements in 2018.
On CNBC last Friday, we stated that we have been in a stealth bull market. Indeed, after anticipating the stock market’s bottom in early February, the stealth bull market emerged.
Today’s popular stocks have literally overwhelmed the stock market in the last four years and six months. To understand today’s financial euphoria, we will analyze three terrific movies made by the actor, Jim Carrey. In Liar Liar, The Truman Show and in Bruce Almighty, we learn morals which we believe should guide us in the long-duration investment process.
On our latest “Talking Markets” podcast, we listen in on a panel of experts discussing the potential US retirement crisis and the fear factors surrounding retirement disruption.
How a fund defines its universe of small stocks eligible for purchase will make a significant difference in performance.
Yesterday’s alpha has been unbundled into market capitalization index, factors and alpha-seeking investments. What does this mean for investors? Is active dead? Of course not! But factors can enhance traditional portfolios by considering a third dimension of return.
There are large swaths of the financial planning landscape that can – and should – be both automated and integrated in such a way to which robo advisors aspire, but do not yet currently deliver.
Alternative investments (alts) were first embraced by institutions, and some people still view them as a complex solution for complex needs. However, a growing number of alternative strategies are now available via mutual funds.
Emerging market stocks are trading near bear market territory, but that’s par for the course for longer-run, rising returns.
Wall Street has ridiculed passive investing for decades. The reason is obvious: Its profits – and for many firms, their very survival – are at stake. The basic argument is that the popularity of indexing (and the broader category of passive investing) is distorting prices as fewer shares are traded by investors performing the act of “price discovery.” Let’s examine the validity of such claims.
Clearly the stock market’s “internals” are pretty perky with the NYSE Advance/Decline Line continuing to point the way higher, and in the process made yet another new all-time high last week.
Personally, I start with a base position of actively managed mutual funds, but not just any fund. The funds I want to own are the ones where I know the portfolio manager.
We need to help each other as regulatory pressures increase and the growing appetite for new financial technology solutions are striving to replace financial advisors.
We’re about nine years into the economic recovery following the Great Recession. It’s been an extraordinarily profitable period for the stock market—one of the best in U.S. history—and I hope you’ve participated.
Many forces undercut and bolster the greenback. Rather than accepting unknown risk around its near- or long-term direction, dollar-based equity investors may be better served using currency hedges so they can focus more on the individual merits of overseas securities.
It was back in November 2010 when James Howard Kunstler first wrote the aforementioned quote. We recalled that quote while spending last week in Nashville seeing institutional accounts and speaking at events for our financial advisors and their clients where the question du jour was, “What’s going on with the potential trade war?”
Danton G. Goei joined Davis Advisors in 1998. He is a portfolio manager for the Davis Large Cap, Global, and International Portfolios and a member of the research team for other portfolios. In this interview, he discusses those funds and why Davis maintains a “wall of mistakes” that immortalizes its investment blunders.
The American educational system prepares our children to be successful in whatever field of work they choose. But that is not true of the popular “stock market game,” which has been hijacked by the brokerage industry to indoctrinate students into disastrous financial practices.
Traditional index funds match market performance and have negligible trading costs with low tracking error—or do they? Not actually—they routinely buy after high price appreciation and sell after high price depreciation. They also have significant trading costs from adding and deleting stocks. We show how index providers can construct better-performing indices that are less prone to performance chasing and have lower turnover.
Team performance matters more than star players or a large resource base. And in a rapidly changing world, Totaalvoetbal can help teams adapt.
This memo covers three ways in which securities markets seem to be moving toward reducing the role of people: (a) index investing and other forms of passive investing, (b) quantitative and algorithmic investing, and © artificial intelligence and machine learning.
We have used this quip from the book Why You Win or Lose: The Psychology of Speculation by Fred C. Kelly many times in our missives over the past nearly five decades because the wisdom of its message is timeless. We recalled it last week in many of our meetings in New York City when we heard certain individual investors, as well as portfolio managers (PMs), say “I should have!”
The U.S. inflation story made further inroads this month, with year-over-year price growth for consumers and producers alike hitting multiyear highs. U.S. consumer prices expanded at their strongest pace in more than six years, climbing to an annual change of 2.8 percent in May. Prices for final demand goods, meanwhile, grew 3.1 percent, their strongest annual surge since December 2011.
Investors and their advisors must be alert to managing both pre-tax and after-tax alpha in order for investors to realize the highest possible return from their taxable portfolios. Increasingly, the opportunities to accomplish both goals are within reach of investors through, for example, tax-advantaged smart beta strategies and tax-efficient vehicles such as ETFs.
At a time of low expected returns, low current yields and economic uncertainty, individual investors are demanding new options. Recent advances in product design enable investors to access less liquid and illiquid institutional-caliber alternatives in a “user-friendly” format which preserves the integrity of the underlying strategy. These new product designs contrast mutual funds which may contain watered-down liquid versions of the original.
New thinking about liquidity, its role in a portfolio and improved access to a wide spectrum of alternatives enables investors to deploy less liquid strategies and capitalize on liquidity premiums.
Risk to the euro resurfaces in an unlikely governing coalition and challenging economic agenda, but Italy’s top stocks don’t face the same perils as its government bonds.
Bob Browne is an executive vice president and chief investment officer for Northern Trust. He is a member of Northern Trust's operating group and management group. He is also co-portfolio manager of the Northern Global Tactical Asset Allocation Fund (BBALX), a top-performing, multi-asset fund.
Last week, in Bubble-Like Stock Valuations Miss $3.4 Trillion in Hidden Assets, Bloomberg detailed how traditional accounting can make a company’s fundamentals “look a lot worse than they are.” In the article, New York University’s Professor Baruch Lev weighs in. “You get numbers which are highly inflated for some companies and are understated for other companies.”
You might think institutions with their large staffs of highly-paid and experienced investment professionals would be a force for stability and reason in financial markets. They are not; stocks heavily owned, and constantly monitored by institutions, have often been among the most inappropriately valued.
Investing based on short term-market gyrations and noise from the 24/7 business news cycle rarely drives alpha. At RBA, we’d rather invest dispassionately based on market fundamentals and focus on longer time horizons. Remember to ignore the Tweet and invest for the meat.
If you live in Texas and have any extra gold bars, coins and/or jewelry lying around that need safekeeping, you’re in luck. The Texas Bullion Depository, the first of its kind in the U.S., officially opened to the public in Austin this week, putting a cap on three years of planning and construction. The private firm managing the facility, Lone Star Tangible Assets, calls it the “world’s most advanced depository.”
New research shows a majority of active managers outperformed their emerging-market benchmarks, and did so by a wide margin (on average 1.57% annually). But it would be wrong to conclude that active management is the winning strategy in EM.
