About Those Trading Quotes..
If you want to lose weight, eat less and move more. If you want to make money in the stock market, cut your losses short and let your winners run. But neither losing weight nor making money is as simple as aphorisms make it seem. Not even Jesse Livermore, who is probably the most widely…
Before You Trash Smart Beta…
It's probably no surprise that the S&P 500 high quality index has outperformed the S&P 500. But what is surprising, to me anyway is that the S&P 500 low quality index has also outperformed the S&P 500 (as well as the high quality index!). How is this possible? It has everything to do with the…
There's A Large Spread Between Large And Small
The S&P 500 always gets the majority of the attention and understandably so, as these 500 504 stocks comprise ~80% of the total U.S. market cap. But something interesting recently happened in the Russell 2000, which represents just ~8% of the total U.S. market cap. The Russell 2000 has made no progress over the past…
Eating Your Own Cooking
Wouldn't you love to know how people actually invest. It's one thing to follow somebody on Twitter or to read their blog, but at the end of the day we have no way of knowing if that person actually practices what they preach. I want to lay my cards on the table, and share how…
The Problem With Average
"Statistician, a person who lays with his head in a oven and his feet in a deep freeze stating, On the average, I feel comfortable"- Bruce Grossman Peter Bernstein describes the average and standard deviation of returns perfectly, he said: "The greater the variance or the standard deviation around the average, the less the average…
An Object In Motion
Emerging Markets have been a serial disappointment. Over the past five years they've been a money loser and were a huge opportunity cost relative to U.S. stocks. But alas, there is at least a glimmer of hope that things might be changing. Emerging Markets (EEM) have spent the last 184 days below the 200-day moving…
Fool You
"The main purpose of the stock market is to make fools of as meny men as possible." -Bernard Baruch The other day I pointed out the unusual weakness out of small cap stocks. I also added the caveat that it was likely not indicative of anything, which is about as close to a prediction as…
The Last Straw
My first job out of college was with a life insurance financial planning company in Manhattan. At first it was a pretty seductive, high energy environment. Unfortunately reality reared its ugly head pretty quickly thereafter. I couldn't understand why life insurance was the right product for everybody, whether they were 30, 40, 50 or even…
Paralysis By Analysis
While many people have recently said it has never been a better time to be an investor, one can also make the case that it has never been as confusing. Between index funds and mutual funds, hedge funds and fund of hedge funds, ETFs and ETNs, financial advisors and robo advisors, there is an overwhelming…
Surviving The Short Term
Thinking and behaving for the long term is one of the most difficult challenges an investor is faced with. Although simply buying and holding has produced fabulous returns, this type of investing requires you to commit to several sizable drawdowns, likely to be over fifty percent in some cases, over the course of your investing career….