2019 is a good year to start off with a country valuation dashboard, given how most of 2018 was a story of US stocks outperforming most other countries’ stock markets, at least until December. Despite last month’s correction, US stocks remain relatively expensive compared to most other countries’ markets, with the US S&P 500 still […]
One of the worst mistakes beginning investors often make is to try and choose top performing mutual funds based solely on past performance. While past performance can be a useful indicator of how a fund invests and what it invests in (high risk and return vs low risk and return), it is all too often […]
“Buy a low cost, passive index fund, and hold it for the long term” is probably one of the most mainstream pieces of investment advice circulating over the past 40 years. While I agree this is a better solution for most busy investors than the high overhead, high fee, and high turnover investment products that […]
For the third factor in this series, I wanted to highlight two of the most “classical” factors for classifying and selecting stocks: size (large vs small) and cheapness (growth vs value). These factors were perhaps most famously identified by academics Eugene Fama and Kenneth French, and popularised in the 3×3 grid used by Morningstar to […]
Buyback yield is one of the top factors I look for in stocks of companies I buy. Buyback yield can be thought of one of at least four components of total shareholder return, the others being book value growth, debt reduction / deleveraging yield (familiar to anyone who has paid down principal on a mortgage), […]
It goes without saying that listed company insiders know more about what is going on within a company and what its near-term earnings results are likely to be than even most professional outside analysts, which is why insider trading is heavily regulated in many jurisdictions. Most regulations don’t outright forbid insiders from trading their company’s […]
Hong Kong small caps are of particular interest to me because I live and work in Hong Kong as a professional investor of retirement portfolios, and am always looking to put together higher quality and better valued portfolios than those available from broad market cap weighted index funds and ETFs. A “small cap” company is […]
Vanguard is synonymous with low-cost, passive investing. Here I present some charts showing some metrics that can be used to enhance an asset allocation of the top Vanguard mutual funds even among these broadly diversified, passive funds. Despite my disagreements with him, Jack Bogle remains one of the foundational figures of today’s investing world I […]
I have been working with “smart beta” strategies since 2006 (before they were even called “smart beta”), and continue to believe that investing through these rules-based factors provides better risk-adjusted returns than index funds at far lower cost than actively managed mutual funds. In GFM-managed client accounts, we continue to apply the well-researched factors, of […]