How a fund defines its universe of small stocks eligible for purchase will make a significant difference in performance.
Wall Street has ridiculed passive investing for decades. The reason is obvious: Its profits – and for many firms, their very survival – are at stake. The basic argument is that the popularity of indexing (and the broader category of passive investing) is distorting prices as fewer shares are traded by investors performing the act of “price discovery.” Let’s examine the validity of such claims.
As expert poker player Annie Duke explains in her book, Thinking in Bets, one of the more common mistakes amateurs make is the tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome. Poker players call this trait “resulting.”
My first book, The Only Guide to a Winning Investment Strategy You’ll Ever Need, was first published 20 years ago, in May 1998. With its 20th anniversary in mind, let’s see how my recommendations worked out for investors who followed them.
Based on the logical, risk-based explanations for the value premium, and the lack of evidence pointing to shrinking valuation spreads, my conclusion is that the most recent 10 years of performance is likely just another of those occasionally occurring but fairly long periods in which the value premium is negative.
New research shows a majority of active managers outperformed their emerging-market benchmarks, and did so by a wide margin (on average 1.57% annually). But it would be wrong to conclude that active management is the winning strategy in EM.
While factor-based, style investing in equities has become popular, its adoption has been much slower in other asset classes, including fixed income. New research shows that style investing can also be applied to bonds.
Despite the evidence, strong past performance is the prerequisite for manager selection by individuals as well as institutional investors. New research explains why investors are likely to get poor results from performance chasing.
Passive investing has been ridiculed by Wall Street for decades. The common theme is that indexing has become such a force that the market’s price discovery function is no longer working properly. Given the number of questions I get about this issue, one would think that passive investing is now dominating markets.
I’ve been getting lots of questions about whether the value premium still exists. Today I’ll share my thoughts on that issue. I’ll begin by explaining why I have been receiving such inquiries.
The U.S. bond market is one of the largest in the world, with managers controlling more than $2 trillion in assets. Given its size, an important question is identifying active bond fund managers that add value.
The traditional 60/40 model no longer can be expected to deliver the same type of results. A new model is for investors to move toward more of a risk-parity portfolio, with assets more equally divided among stocks, bonds and these new alternatives.
To address questions about the benefits of international investing and diversification, we don’t have to look too far back in time.
Advisors will learn how using factors and alternative investments that have premiums that are unique and have evidence of persistence, pervasiveness, robustness, implementability, and intuitive risk- or behavioral-based explanations for why we should expect the premiums to persist in the future can lead to the building of more efficient portfolio that also reduce tail risks. You will learn which factors from the over 600 in the literature should be considered and which alternatives out of the many available should be used and why.
The underperformance of Buffett’s Berkshire stock (BRK.A) relative to the S&P 500 over the last 10 years is virtually fully explained by the negative performance of the value factor over that period.
At the start of 2017, I compiled a list of predictions that market gurus had made for the upcoming year, along with some items I heard frequently from investors, for a sort of consensus on the year’s “sure things.” As is my practice, I will give a score of +1 for a forecast that came true, a score of -1 for one that was wrong, and a 0 for one that was basically a tie.
While U.S. equity valuations clearly are at historically high levels, is the outlook as bleak as it seems? Perhaps not. Let’s see why that is the case.
Economic theory posits that investors require high expected returns when cyclical consumption is low in economic contractions and low expected returns when cyclical consumption is high in economic expansions. New research is consistent with that theory.
There isn’t convincing evidence that a style-timing strategy, based on business cycles, can be expected to be profitable going forward.
There are logical explanations for why the size premium may have shrunk. But there also remain simple, intuitive, risk-based explanations for why the premium should persist.
Diminished cognitive skills, often the result of Alzheimer’s disease, are the greatest threat to the financial stability of your older clients, particularly those over age 65. A new book directed to advisors provides the tools to identify and overcome those threats.
In biblical tradition, the four horsemen of the apocalypse are a quartet of immensely powerful entities personifying the four prime concepts – war, famine, pestilence and death – that drive the apocalypse. For today’s investors, the equivalent is historically high equity valuations, historically low bond yields, increasing longevity and, as a result, the increasing need for what can be very expensive long-term care.
At least for tax-advantaged investors, dividends are irrelevant: They are neither good nor bad in terms of forward-looking return expectations. Therefore, while there is no reason to exclude dividend-paying stocks, focusing solely on them leads to less diversified (less efficient) portfolios.
REITs are vulnerable to an increase in interest rates or an economic contraction. If you have been thinking of increasing your allocation to REITs to generate more cash flow, this new research – and current valuations – should serve as a cautionary warning.
I often hear criticisms about the use of bond ladders. Whenever the criticism comes from professional advisors, however, I’ve noticed it generally involves firms that use only bond mutual funds or ETFs instead of individual, tailored bond portfolios, whether in the form of a bond ladder or not. Unfortunately, much – if not all – of this criticism is based on falsehoods and the conflicts that can arise when advisors employ only mutual funds and ETFs.
What explains the fact that municipal bond yields are only slightly lower than equivalent Treasury bonds, giving muni investors a much higher taxable-equivalent yield? The answer lies in their liquidity, which is good news, especially for buy-and-hold investors of individual bonds.
Leveraged funds may seem like a good idea – if we expect the S&P 500 to be positive, for instance, then getting four times its return seems even better – but long-term investors (and there shouldn’t be any other kind) should be skeptical.
A family wealth mission statement (FWMS) is a relatively brief statement that encapsulates your family’s purpose, goals and standards.
Each year Americans spend huge sums preparing to transition their assets to their heirs, engaging high-powered estate and tax planners who set up complex vehicles like family limited partnerships, life insurance, charitable remainder, charitable lead and various other kinds of trusts. Yet, despite the best efforts of top-notch professionals, the majority of plans fail. Why?
Socially responsible investing (SRI) has captured nearly a quarter of U.S.-based assets. New evidence from one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds shows that those investors are sacrificing significant performance. Indeed, they are giving up more than 1% a year – effectively doubling the typical 1% AUM advisory fee.
My firm recently approved a new alternative investment, one that until recently was only available through hedge funds, the Stone Ridge Reinsurance Risk Premium Interval Fund (SRRIX).
Fama and French’s 1992 seminal research, which identified the value and size factors, was met with skepticism. Even the authors questioned the underlying economic rationale for their findings. With a quarter century of data, let’s look back and see if the skepticism was justified. Have value and small-cap outperformed?
Diversification has been called the only free lunch in investing. Many investors consider total-market funds, such as Vanguard’s Total Stock Market Index Fund (VTSMX), to be not only the most efficient (based on modern financial theory and, specifically, the efficient markets hypothesis) but also the most diversified. Leaving aside the question of whether Vanguard’s fund is the most efficient portfolio, let’s evaluate whether it’s the most diversified.
The evidence is overwhelming that past performance is a poor predictor of active managers’ performance. Studies have found that, beyond a year or two, there is little evidence of performance persistence. A newly published academic study reveals why it’s so hard for active managers to persistently beat a benchmark.
To see how well Janus’ actively managed funds have performed for its investors, I’ll compare the results of its actively managed equity funds to those of index funds from Vanguard and the structured asset class funds of DFA.
Previously, I analyzed the performance of some of the leading and largest actively managed mutual funds that focus on high-dividend strategies. Today, I’ll examine the strategy of investing in companies that have shown persistent growth in dividends.
While it is not yet resolved whether the low-volatility and low-beta anomalies can be fully explained by exposures to other well-known factors, their popularity certainly has changed the valuation metrics of low-volatility stocks. At the very least, this should raise a flag of caution for investors who have been enticed by the historical data.
Low-vol strategies have attracted a lot of attention, in part because they portend to offer investors a free lunch – higher returns with lower volatility. But they carry hidden risks that every investor must understand.
Given the heightened interest in dividend strategies, I’ll take a look at how some of the leading providers of actively managed dividend-based strategies have performed.
