Learning Center

Saying No, So You Can Say Yes When It Matters

Date08 Feb 2016

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I have a problem: It’s really hard for me to say no to new, exciting projects. If you’re doing creative work at all (and I’m using this term very broadly, so that should mean just about everybody), then you’ve probably run into this problem yourself. There are endless options for how you could spend your...

A Laundry List of Excuses for Active Managers

Date08 Feb 2016

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As sure as the sun rises in the east, at the start of each year, you’ll hear from “gurus” appearing in the financial media that this year will be a stock picker’s year. And as sure as the sun sets in the west, when the year ends, you will hear various excuses for why it...

Does Firing Money Managers Lead to Improved Performance?

Date25 Jan 2016

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Leonard Kostovetsky and Jerold Warner, the authors of the study You’re Fired! New Evidence on Portfolio Manager Turnover and Performance, which was published in the August 2015 issue of the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, contribute to the literature on the performance of money managers by examining managerial turnover at both internally managed mutual...

Outsourcing Management: Does It Improve the Performance of Mutual Funds?

Date25 Jan 2016

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From 1980 to 2014, the percentage of American households that owned mutual funds rose from 5.7 percent to 43.4 percent. At the beginning of 1980, mutual funds held only around 4 percent of all U.S. equity. However, that figure is now around 30 percent. That increased share is basically explained by the fact that direct...

The Two Types of Risks Every Investor Must Understand

Date25 Jan 2016

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As markets start off the new year with a global slide in prices, you may want to re-acquaint yourself with a concept often found in standard introductory courses on economics–the difference between systematic and nonsystematic risk. Your retirement assets could depend on it. While those words may sound like a bunch of financial mumbo jumbo,...

Why Investors Need to Embrace Bear Markets

Date25 Jan 2016

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Suppose you had a friend whose lifelong dream was to travel overseas. But this friend was deathly afraid of experiencing turbulence on an airplane. So he decided to forgo his trip until a new plane was invented, one able to guarantee with absolute certainty that passengers would never feel turbulence. You might be thinking, “Good...

Private Equity Not Worth Fees

Date25 Jan 2016

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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 equity and its exorbitant fees … as an asset class and with the right fund,...

Scoring 2015’s ‘Sure Things’

Date25 Jan 2016

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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, of whether these “sure thing” forecasts actually came to pass. Well, the inevitable turn of...

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