Fund A Description Fund invests in penny stocks of companies where the CEO is a man, whose name is Chris, and has eaten a hamburger once in the past 12 months.  Positions are weighted by how many hamburgers the CEO has eaten. The management fee is 2.0% per year, plus a 5% front end load [...]

Let’s say you had the choice of the four following investing systems, which would you prefer? Well of course you would say C,B,D,A in that order.  Who wouldn’t?  And well of course you know from reading me that this is likely a trick question. Investment A and C are actually the same system, the S&P [...]

I’ve written about using valuation till I’m blue in the face, in particular using the CAPE ratio.  (Here is a an old summary post.) Despite the fact that sorting countries on global CAPE ratios is having a monster year, people are still very critical on using CAPE.  I tweeting this out earlier: CAPE ratios of [...]

For many investors, this election is a nightmare. It feels a bit like taking your chances against, say, jumping in the ocean with a shark on one hand, or stumbling in the bush upon a lion on the other. Either way, the outcome appears inevitable. You’re in trouble. If Trump wins, you have famous businessmen [...]

I used to write about the top college endowments quite a bit – turn back seven years and my first book was on the topic – The Ivy Portfolio.  So when Harvard recently made news by announcing returns for the $36 billion endowment were a disappointing -2% in fiscal year 2016, I thought we’d revisit the topic.  (Endowment [...]

I was giving a speech this week to the Stansberry group in Las Vegas and was, as always, talking about valuations.  Specifically I was talking about Bogle’s simple stock market formula for forecasting future 10 year returns.  The example I gave went something like this: We’re in Las Vegas so let’s use this analogy.  Let’s [...]

I get most of my quant research done while trying to avoid other less interesting work.  So I was curious when I saw my friend John Hussman writing about an obscure technical indicator called the Coppock Curve.  I filed it away as “interesting”, sent it to the Idea Farm list, then moved on.  But they [...]

I think John Bogle is a national treasure.  That doesn’t mean I agree with him of course on everything (huge difference of opinion in foreign stock investing).  But he’s been a strong positive influence on our industry for 40 years.  I was scanning this recent article from the WSJ on the plane flight to Vancouver, [...]

I was skimming this recent publication from BNY Mellon and FT remark when a particular graphic caught my eye.  Below is a survey from 400+ real money institutional respondents (we’re talking endowments, pension funds, insurance companies, and sovereign wealth funds).  This is their estimate of the net returns they will receive from their hedge funds: 1% [...]

I sat in on this speech of Arnott‘s, and as usual great work.  He touches a lot of ground, well worth watching!  One of my favorite references was to “over-rebalancing” to value. View presentation on Vimeo here.