One idea that many investment thinkers have tossed around for many years, even long before the publication of Burton Malkiel’s classic but controversial “A Random Walk Down Wall Street”, is the idea of constructing stock portfolios by pure random selection. The idea has been tested and narrated many ways, with perhaps the most famous image […]
Although I have long considered myself a fan of “dividend investing”, I am just as aware that not all dividend dollars are equal in quality, and so often look at “dividend alternatives” as part of the “total shareholder yield” picture. “Total Shareholder Yield” often refers to the sum of ways profitable companies can return cash […]
This morning’s ferry read is the Credit Suisse Global Investment Returns Yearbook 2019, for which I have to thank this excellent Twitter thread by Cambria’s Meb Faber for pointing out. Two of the charts I found worth a screenshot and share here show shares of global stock markets have changed since 1900 by country (header […]
I recently found some charts on this tweet thread worth checking against some of my earlier posts on investing with a value tilt. These are similar to my earlier chart about forward 10 year investment returns versus on CAPE ratio, and can be summarized in the title of the first chart “Long term, valuation is […]
While putting together reviews of the past decade, I have looked at how emerging markets have performed vs developed markets, how bonds performed versus small and value stocks, and the Dow vs the Nasdaq. Here, I also want to look at how hedge funds performed over the past decade. First, let’s look at a traditional […]
I have no experience piloting airplanes, and admit there have been several times as a passenger that I have been afraid of turbulence. What helps me stay calm in turbulent flights is remembering descriptions I heard from at least one pilot interview on how insignificant most turbulence is compared with how high the plane is […]
Although recent protests have drawn more international news cameras than usual, international wealth management clients have compared opening an investment account Hong Kong to having one in Switzerland, Singapore, or South Florida (Miami) for decades if not since the World Wars. While Hong Kong vs Singapore may be the most overdone comparison in Asia, this […]
It is widely repeated in the investment community that the biggest difference in whether you earn high or low rates of return as a long-term investor is not your choice of an individual stock or bond, but how much you allocated overall to stocks vs bonds. The more you put in stocks, the more likely […]
While there is a lot of merit to simply investing in a broadly diversified portfolio of low cost index funds, market cap weighted index funds have some features (or flaws, depending how you see it) that drive me to alternatives. One key example is this recent WSJ story highlighting how US index funds are about […]
68% of shareholders want to replace Mark Zuckerberg as chairman of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ: FB), but Mark Zuckerberg still holds the majority of voting shares (source: Facebook March 2019 Quarterly Report, page 54). As much talk as there is about Facebook’s role IN democracy, this is a reminder that the corporate structure of Facebook IS […]