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.
The Great Bond Bull Market is Over June 2016 will most likely be remembered as the end of the great bond bull market. 34 years earlier in 1982, when then Fed Chair Paul Volcker turned the full force of the Federal Reserve to fighting inflation, both the 10 year Treasury yield and the Consumer Price Index (CPI) stood at approximately 15%.
I can’t quite remember how I met Craig Drill, captain of Drill Capital Management, but meet him I did over a decade ago and we have become kindred spirts. Maybe it’s because we both have been in the business a long time, or maybe it is because of our connection to First Boston in a life gone by.
Despite the evidence, strong past performance is the prerequisite for manager selection by individuals as well as institutional investors. New research explains why investors are likely to get poor results from performance chasing.
David Littleton is a founding principal of the Vestmark Manager Marketplace. I spoke with him about how this solution drives value for advisors and asset managers.
Prices will rise—for producers and consumers alike—which is good for gold but a headwind for continued economic growth.
Serious gold investors know that May has historically been a weak month for the price of the yellow metal. For the 10-year and 30-year periods, the month delivered negative returns.
High-quality bonds and defensive stocks are on the ropes. And U.S. blue-chips look poised to roll over, if history is any guide. But what if it isn’t?
Readers of these missives should know our fundamental energy analysts have been bullish on oil for quite some time, as have we. In fact, we have been bullish on commodities in general, often noting they are the cheapest relative to equities as they have been since the 1960s. Yet last week crude oil’s decline spooked energy investors, raising the question, “Is the crude oil rally over?”
The first defaults will occur at the lowest end of the problematic market: high yield or “junk” bonds. They will play a role comparable to subprime mortgages in the last crisis. We’ll see mortgage problems as well, but I think overleveraged companies will be the core problem.
Public debt may be growing at the expense of private debt, the Chinese bond market is opening up, and important dates for tariffs are fast approaching.
Equities are 2-5% higher so far in May, trying to add to their small gains from April and put behind a rough winter. This week, small caps closed at a new all-time high (ATH) and NDX broke to a 7 week high near its March ATH.
We have always liked the movie “City Slickers” and particularly one scene. It’s the scene where Curly (Jack Palance) turns to Mitch Robbins (Billy Crystal) and says, “Do you know the secret of life?” The punchline is, “It’s just one thing” (one thing). For investors we agree, all you need to know is just one thing.
Passive investing has been ridiculed by Wall Street for decades. The common theme is that indexing has become such a force that the market’s price discovery function is no longer working properly. Given the number of questions I get about this issue, one would think that passive investing is now dominating markets.
The Fed chairman makes clear the bar for slowing monetary tightening is higher nowadays, and argues emerging markets are much better positioned to handle higher U.S. yields than they were before.
Today, we revisit the military preparedness question following President Trump’s nearly $700 billion military budget to attempt to make our military readiness better. We think the recent weakness in the defense sector stocks provides an interesting entry spot for investors.
I’ve been saying for some time that the next financial crisis will bring a major debt crisis. But as you’ll see today, it is a small part, maybe the opening event, of a rapidly-approaching train wreck. We’ll need several weeks to tease out all the causes and consequences, so this letter will be the first in a series.
So we headed to NYC early Thursday morning in search of the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” After touching down at LaGuardia we climbed into a yellow taxi held together by duct tape, rode over potholed streets with our cell phone cutting in and out (gosh I love New York City), and arrived at Grand Central Terminal around 11:00 a.m.
On May 14, new MSRB regulations will require the disclosure of the often dramatic markups that retail investors are subject to when buying individual municipal bonds. Will this accelerate the shift into active municipal bond management?
The U.S. bond market is one of the largest in the world, with managers controlling more than $2 trillion in assets. Given its size, an important question is identifying active bond fund managers that add value.
Fear that the multi-decade bull market in bonds will end has centered on the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield breaching 3%. But Jeffrey Gundlach said that is the wrong focus.
Gold was up half a percent year-to-date through last Friday. This doesn’t sound very exciting, but over the same period, the S&P 500 Index was in the red—the first time in nearly a decade that stocks have been negative for the year through the beginning of May.
Bond supply is plummeting, but so is demand. And rates are rising. Where are the silver linings?
The economic calendar is normal, with an emphasis on inflation data. The week will begin with analysis of the annual Berkshire Hathaway meeting, the wisdom of Buffett and Munger, and a multi-hour CNBC program including Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, and Bill Gates.
The traditional 60/40 model no longer can be expected to deliver the same type of results. A new model is for investors to move toward more of a risk-parity portfolio, with assets more equally divided among stocks, bonds and these new alternatives.
Stocks slide on rising rates and yield curve inversion concerns, but a recession doesn't look likely, judging by other economic data and the high-yield bond market.
“A long time ago in a galaxy far far away” I was running three separate departments at then Richmond-based Wheat, First Securities. Subsequently, Tom Dorsey and Watson Wright decided to leave Wheat, First and form the now legendary firm of Dorsey Wright. When they left, that department fell under my management.
As the Federal Reserve (Fed) tightens monetary policy further, we expect to see default rates higher next year. Loan recovery rates averaged 70 percent between 1990 and 2017 as a result of their secured status and seniority in the capital structure. Senior secured bond recovery rates averaged 58 percent over the same period, while senior unsecured bond recovery rates averaged 43 percent. We are concerned about distressed exchanges as the risk of re-default is high. About 7 percent of high-yield corporate bond issuers have defaulted in the past.
While novice investors typically stumble onto the concept of trend following in the context of stock-market timing, professionals know that trend following is not about using trends to time one or two individual markets. Modern professional trend followers often trade dozens of futures markets across equities, bonds, currencies, commodities and more obscure markets like carbon offsets.
In short, there is not enough data to have me predict a recession and the consequent bear market. But there’s enough data bubbling up all around me that it makes me very nervous, and I am paying close attention. You should be, too.
The previous article I wrote on this subject was so popular that I had to continue my tirade. Toss these six marketing buzzwords in the never-to-be-used jargon dumpster, in reverse order from the least to most offensive.
