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Quick Take on Fixed Income – Effects of Lowering Credit Quality in Municipal Bond Portfolio

Date15 Sep 2014

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Q: Can you capture higher returns on a municipal portfolio by lowering its credit quality? A: Investors generally demand a higher yield when purchasing lower-credit-quality municipal bonds due to their greater risk. The assumption is the greater the risk, the greater the expected return. However, evidence has shown that investors have not realized higher risk-adjusted...

Quick Take on Fixed Income – Characteristics of Preferred Stocks

Date15 Sep 2014

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Q: What are the characteristics of preferred stocks? A: Preferred stocks can be viewed as a hybrid of stocks and bonds. Preferred shareholders receive preference over common equity holders (hence the term “preferred”) for dividend payouts and in the event of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. However, all debt holders would be paid before any...

Markets Keep Defying the Experts and the News

Date08 Sep 2014

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On Aug. 25, the S&P 500 index closed above 2,000 for the first time — finishing at 2,000.24. It had taken the index more than 16 years to double from its first close above 1,000 on Feb. 2, 1998, when it finished at 1,001.27. That 16-year span is more than five times as long as...

Learn From the Fall of Active Management

Date08 Sep 2014

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Proponents of evidence-based investing, myself included, doubted whether this day would ever come. Investors are now actually paying attention to the overwhelming data supporting evidence-based investing and are fleeing active management. Some of the recent developments reinforcing this growing trend are: Index funds are mainstream John Rekenthaler is the vice president of research for Morningstar....

The Mystery Of Momentum

Date08 Sep 2014

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Momentum is a well-established, empirical fact. Its premium is evident in more than 87 years of domestic market data, in more than 20 years of out-of-sample evidence beginning from the time of its original discovery, in statistics from 40 other countries, and in the performance of more than a dozen different asset classes. In fact,...

Private Equity Not Worth The Risk

Date08 Sep 2014

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Last week, I wrote in-depth about some of the problems with hedge funds, especially in terms of how they’re viewed and how they affect financial markets as a whole. I thought I’d begin this week with a closer look at the performance of private equity, another nonpublicly traded investment. The term “private equity” is used...

Quick Take on Fixed Income

Date08 Sep 2014

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Markets keep defying experts and the news

Date08 Sep 2014

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