Chinese manufacturing activity slumped to a record low in February as the coronavirus outbreak temporarily shuttered plants and factories and travel restrictions impacted the supply of labor.

There are predictable patterns in security returns that conflict with market efficiency. If there are behavioral explanations, these are called anomalies. A new study looks at whether “insiders” exploit those anomalies – and whether investors can benefit from observing insider trading patterns.

What impact will coronavirus and market volatility have on your portfolio?

In recognition of International Women’s Day on 8 March, Cady Johnson shares her perspective on gender equality in the financial services industry.

Sonal Desai, PH.D., is executive vice president and chief investment officer of Franklin Templeton Fixed Income, as well a portfolio manager for a number of strategies. In this interview, she discusses the unique investment strategy she has developed, as well as the key risks – specifically the coronavirus – facing investors.

We spend a lot of time in these pages endeavoring to wax poetically about the world at large and our investment place within it, even though that is not really what we do for a living. We get it. Some people just want to know our thoughts about the investment world…and yes, we do have opinions on that subject.

From a full-cycle perspective, the decline in the U.S. stock market from its recent high remains something of a non-event, compared with the probable market loss over the completion of this cycle.

The US equity markets have fallen sharply the past week on concerns of coronavirus diseases 2019. This novel coronavirus affects the respiratory system, was first identified in Wuhan, China more than two months ago, and has now spread to all major economies globally.

With the markets shell shocked by of the worst weeks on record, analysts are split on whether investors are simply overreacting to the coronavirus epidemic or if we are confronting an actual existential threat to the global economy.

Bob Browne is the chief investment officer of Northern Trust Asset Management, which has more than $900 billion in assets. He chairs the firm's investment policy committee, which sets investment policy for all Northern Trust groups. In this interview, he discusses his views on the global economy and markets.

Lesson #2: Reversion to the mean occurs because people persuasive enough to make something grow don’t have the kind of personalities that allow them to stop before pushing too far.

If the virus in fact becomes a national crisis, it might have a bearing on how a segment of voters decides whether to support the President in any of three ways...

Although there were good reasons to question whether GDP growth would accelerate in the first quarter, there were also good reasons why I expected the rate of growth to improve before mid year.

The coronavirus outbreak has altered market dynamics since late January – including in the space of equity style factors. One example, Quality has posted more muted gains after strong outperformance in late 2019. We stand by our tactical views on factors for now, including a modest overweight on quality.

There are two key drivers of investment returns. One is valuations, which provide a great deal of information about long-term investment prospects, and about the income component of total returns. The other is the uniformity or divergence of prices across thousands of individual securities, which helps to distinguish whether shorter-term investor psychology is inclined toward speculation or risk-aversion.

Markets around the world are tumbling on fears that the coronavirus could significantly derail global economic growth.

If you want to scare the heck out of yourself, read this report from VPNoverview on typical “dark web” data theft sites, including the cost for compromised data such as PayPal transfers, bank cards, and full identities.

Sometimes life is an endless exercise in trying to attain goals that are just slightly out of reach. Even when we reach those goals, we’re not satisfied. We set new ones and repeat the process. But I’ve found a surprising “happiness hack” that breaks this cycle.

In September 2017, when the Trump Administration began promoting the idea of tax cut legislation, I wrote a series of articles discussing the fallacy that tax cuts would lead to higher tax collections, and a reduction in the deficit...

Our topic today is multi-asset class and multi-factor-equity strategies. One of the leaders in that field is QS Investors. It offers a quantitative approach that unites the intellectual and academic precision of science, engineering, mathematics, and finance and investment expertise with the power of data and technology.

Gold mining stocks have broken out, with several hitting new 52-week highs this week. Gold royalty and streaming companies, including Franco-Nevada and Wheaton Precious Metals, also hit fresh 52-week highs.

Technology shares are once again leaving everything else in the dust. Year-to-date, the MSCI Information Technology sector, led by U.S. tech, is beating the broader market by over 5% and is ahead of laggards, notably energy, by nearly 20%.

In recent years, U.S. stocks have far outperformed international stocks, and growth stocks have far outperformed value stocks. That has led many to question the benefits of diversification and ask what they should do when an investment strategy performs poorly. This podcast will answer that question.

Over the past decade, and particularly over the last several years, there has been a dramatic increase in ESG investing strategies. That has coincided with robust economic and market performance in the U.S. New research examines whether strong ESG returns are likely to be tied to a strong economy and market.

Three key themes from our latest Cyclical Outlook will likely drive the global economy and central bank policy in the year ahead.

It’s time for our monthly look at market risk factors. We had a strong start to the year, with U.S. markets at all-time highs by mid-January. But a risk-off sentiment driven by the spread of the coronavirus from China spooked investors, leading to modest declines for equity markets at month-end.

No matter what industry you work in, being a woman brings unique challenges that men don’t have to deal with. The response isn’t to resign ourselves or get overly caught up in fighting for systemic change. Instead, identify what those challenges are and get the resources you need to overcome them.

So how much would you pay to own the boxing gloves worn by Ali or Frazier that day? What would its worth be to a collector today? – ‘Priceless.’ A funny word that the term priceless tends to come into play when the historic or sentimental value of an object far outweighs its intrinsic value. An object whose worth truly lies in the eyes of the beholder.

With all the attention that is paid to macroeconomic variables and forecasted growth, it’s vitally important to understand the role that the economy plays in portfolio returns – in particular, the returns of the value, beta and size factors.

January was a tough month. We started with a U.S. attack on an Iranian general (creating thoughts of war) and ended with the possibility of a new global pandemic (with the Wuhan coronavirus spreading around the world). In between, of course, we had the impeachment spectacle here in the U.S., as well as the British exit from the European Union.

Kenneth Leech, Chief Investment Officer at Western Asset Management, takes a deep dive into what he views as key market drivers throughout 2020 as well as his current view on various sectors within the bond markets.

In today’s society people are choosing to have fewer children, and delaying having children at all into later, less fertile years. These two factors have driven fertility rates below replacement level in most of the world, but a crucial third factor gets little attention and is having a profound impact on fertility: toxicity. The economic and social ramifications will be severe.

The state of monetary policy explains why so many people are falling behind and why wealth inequality is at levels last seen almost 100 years ago.

CLSA predicts that the price of gold will beat the S&P 500 in 2020. The Hong Kong investment firm has an impressive track record when it comes to making market predictions—last year it had a 70 percent hit rate—so it may be prudent to take this one seriously.

Read Harold Evensky's latest newsletter.

Pricing dislocations in Europe, performance dispersion across the credit spectrum and shifts in the political landscape should likely provide abundant opportunities for select hedge strategies in the year ahead, according to K2 Advisors. The team shares some macro themes and questions its focused on, and shares its outlook for various hedge strategies.

What makes an investment philosophy or product ESG-friendly? The answers may surprise you.

With U.S. growth anticipated to be moderate this year, little was expected in the way of fiscal policy (taxes, government spending) and monetary policy (short-term interest rates), but life comes at you fast.

The current drawdown has been by far the longest as well as the second largest since July 1963, eclipsed only by the tech bubble from 1997 to 2000. Arnott, Harvey, Kalesnik, and Linnainmaa examine the potential causes of value’s underperformance and provide estimates of value’s performance relative to growth’s performance under different revaluation scenarios over the next decade.

Equities saw strong 2019 performances across the globe, so the big question for investors is whether the bullish momentum can continue. Templeton Global Equity Group’s Alan Bartlett and Tony Docal provide a look at what drove the positive performances around the globe in late 2019, and how they are poised to take advantage of any potential dislocations in the year ahead.

One of the most important discoveries in finance over the past few decades is that stocks of firms that share certain fundamental characteristics called “factors” exhibit different return and risk characteristics than the overall market. Critical to investors is the fact that, over long periods of time, certain of these factors have earned excess returns compared to the overall market.

New research confirms that stocks with high projected earnings growth underperform those with low projections. This anomaly is due to underlying behavioral biases that also explain why value has underperformed growth over the last decade – and why value is poised for a reversal.

Every instance of financial speculation today is termed a “bubble”, but true financial bubbles are rarer than most investors believe and they go beyond the financial markets and pervade society.

Conventional wisdom has long held that value stocks and growth stocks work in different ways, and therefore wouldn’t be found in the same mutual fund. In recent years it has become increasingly difficult to tell the difference between a value and growth manager’s portfolio.

The idea that interest rates directly affect stock prices is a commonly held belief among many investors. There are some that even go as far as to say that the only reason the stock market is up is because interest rates have been artificially kept low by the Fed.

Private credit relies less on broad market trends and more on the strength of each specific investment. For individuals facing retirement, institutions looking to satisfy long-term pension liabilities or even private investors looking for alternative investments, it offers high current income, low correlations with public markets and lower default risks than yield spreads would imply.

Since 2002, S&P Dow Jones Indices has published its SPIVA reports, which compare the performance of actively managed equity funds to their appropriate index benchmarks. It also puts out a pair of scorecards each year that focus on persistence of performance. Here are the latest results.

It has been a great year for equity investors. The S&P 500 index posted a 31% annual return, the Dow 25%, and the NASDAQ a spectacular 39%. More than $6T of equity paper wealth was created for domestic investors this year alone.

Back in mid-November, the highly respected GDP forecasting model from the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank (also known as "GDP Now"), estimated that real GDP would only grow at a 0.3% annual rate in the fourth quarter, which, if accurate, would have been the slowest growth for any quarter since 2015. At the time, we were forecasting economic growth at a 3.0% rate.

A decade of central bank easing and the resulting low-volatility environment have made many investors complacent about risk management. We believe the next 10 years will be more volatile than the last 10 years, and risk management will be central to the delivery of consistent alpha.