The cognoscenti who dissect every word in Federal Open Market Committee statements predicted “patient” would be dropped from the March 18 “Fedspeak” press release. They were correct—and Voila!, the Dow Jones tacked on 300 points.
Many stock investors would like to forget the early 2000s and the vast sums of money lost. Yet valuable lessons can be learned from studying this textbook case of market irrationality.
The strength of the U.S. stock market has almost every “strategist” predicting that stocks will continue their upward trajectory this year.
While unicorns bestow wealth to a group of newly rich entrepreneurs, they might not be particularly profitable for investors.
Financial markets were rocked on Jan. 15 when the Swiss National Bank surprised the world by removing its three-year cap on the Swiss franc/euro exchange rate.
It is doubtful that any analyst predicted the interest rate on the 10-year Treasury bond would fall dramatically from 3.03 percent to 2.17 percent.
The ongoing debate between “active” portfolio management and “passive” management is again a hot topic as 2014 comes to a close.
While recent years have been a boon to upper-income groups, evidenced by sales of luxury goods and rising stock prices, the economy now seems poised to provide a boost to the broader population.
Steadfast investors are seeing new highs as the market indexes are now some 20 percent above the high reached in 2007 before the credit crisis.
Companies with two or more distinct businesses operating under their umbrella will sometimes conclude that spinning off a subsidiary into a separate company is beneficial to all stakeholders.
The latest trend enabled by computers is “robo-advisers.” These computer-driven financial advisers are springing up to offer low-cost, automated portfolio management.
Chalk this up as one for “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” The employees of some well-known financial firms have sued their employers for placing their own company’s proprietary mutual funds in their 401(k) plans.
California Public Employees’ Retirement System is dumping its entire hedge fund program. The reason, according to Ted Eliopoulos, the chief investment officer, is “their complexity, cost and lack of ability to scale to CalPERS size.“
Recently, financial academics, like Rob Arnott of Research Affiliates, have published white papers supporting a different type of index investing. They call their creation “smart beta.
While the goal of many investors is to “beat the market,” it is a well-known fact that most investors (including professionals), underperform the market over the long run. Hence, the argument to buy index funds. Investors who invest in index funds accept the aggregate ups and downs (volatility) of the broad stock market.
The Securities and Exchange Commission last month approved new rules for money market funds, which require institutional “prime” money funds and municipal funds to have a floating net asset value, or NAV.
The California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the largest public pension fund in the United States, recently announced it would reduce its hedge fund investments by a dramatic 40 percent.
When it comes to investing, some deep thinking can provide perspective on your finances. A reflective investor will find himself challenging some of the accepted beliefs held dear by the investment industry.
Considering that annual fees can run 3 percent or more, and investment performance for the vast majority of these funds has been subpar, if offered a liquid-alt mutual fund, our decision would be to pass.
Wall Street’s propensity to create arcane products and sell them to investors within broad asset-allocation programs has increased portfolio complexity and altered overall performance.
