Make Your Retirement Money Last
Whether you are planning to retire, or are already retired, Jane Bryant Quinn’s “How to Make Your Money Last: The Indispensable Retirement Guide” is one of the best “investments” you can make. Ms. Quinn is one of the leading journalists...
Active Underperforms In EM, Too
A recent article in The Wall Street Journal proposed that investors consider five factors before investing in emerging markets. One of these five factors was the flexibility of active funds. The author, Michael Pollock, writes: “Managers of active funds can...
Not A Stock Picker’s Market. Again.
At the end of 2014, Tom Lee, co-founder and head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors, explained why only about one out of five actively managed funds were able to outperform their benchmark index that year, and why he believed...
More 2015 Investor Lessons
Earlier this week, we began discussing 10 important lessons that the markets taught us in 2015 about the prudent investment strategy. In lessons one through three, we explored active management as a loser’s game, the “conventional wisdom” about the correlation...
Investor Lessons From 2015
Every year, the market provides us with important lessons on the prudent investment strategy. Many times, the market will offer investors remedial courses, covering lessons that it has already delivered in previous years. That’s why one of my favorite sayings...
Hedge Funds Miss Mark
Hedge funds began 2015 coming off their sixth-straight year of trailing U.S. stocks (as measured by the S&P 500 Index) by significant margins. And for the 10-year period ending 2014, one that included the worst bear market in the post-Depression...
Final Investor Lessons From 2015
So far, we’ve covered seven important lessons that the market taught investors in 2015 about the prudent investment strategy. These lessons, some of which repeat year after year, have addressed active management as a loser’s game; the correlation between the...
Private Equity Not Worth Fees
The headline of a December article in The New York Times declared: “Private Equity Fees Are Sky-High, Yes, but Look at Those Returns.” The author, Steven Davidoff Solomon, was making the case that while “critics love to complain about private...
Scoring 2015’s ‘Sure Things’
At the start of 2015, I put together a list of predictions that financial “gurus” had made for the upcoming year, especially the ones that gained consensus as “sure things.” I then kept track, through a series of periodic updates,...
Evaluating Hartford’s Performance
How do some of the market’s most recognizable active mutual fund families stack up to a comparable passive counterpart? To explore that question, I’ll continue my evaluation of active fund performance with an in-depth look the Hartford family of funds...
