Did Your Retirement Bucket Spring a Leak in 2022?
Not 2008, not the early 1980s, but 2022 was the worst year for bonds on record, according to an analysis by investment historian Edward McQuarrie. That’s more than a headline for financial advisors who have relied on fixed income as the less-volatile portion of their 70/30 or 60/40 portfolios – especially for their retirement-age clients.…
Read MoreCan Retirement Income Be Modernized? A Guide for Financial Advisors.
Just one of these scenarios likely would be enough to cause concern for an investor: Yet in 2022, we’re facing all three at once. It’s a potentially catastrophic combination, especially for investors nearing or in the early years of retirement. In my opinion, this is a “perfect storm” (yes, I know that’s a super cliché…
Read MoreCourage is Not the Absence of Fear In Mountaineering (Investing Too!)
A friend recently convinced me to watch a new(ish) Netflix documentary, “14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible.” It follows a Nepalese mountaineer who attempts to climb all 14 of the world’s peaks higher than 8,000 meters in less than seven months. Even a non-climber like me can appreciate that the endeavor undertaken by the film’s star,…
Read MoreYou Know Who’s Terrible in a Crisis? A Robot.
Call me a luddite if you like, but few things annoy me as much as when I navigate to a new webpage and that, “How can I help you?” box pops up on the lower right. That chatbot entering uninvited always sends me on a frantic search for how to make it disappear as quickly…
Read MoreIs Planning Alpha Greater than Investment Alpha?
How does that saying go? Something about how the more things change, the more they stay the same? Within financial advisory practices, this sentiment rings abundantly true in the area of portfolio construction/management. So much has changed in the past few years. For one, the pandemic altered how investors interact with their advisors. Potentially more…
Read MoreSurvey Says Sell Discipline Sucks
The last time an asset manager told you about their buy/sell process, did the conversation sound a lot like what’s depicted in this pie chart? It’s bewildering, considering building and maintaining an investment portfolio requires decisions about what to buy and sell. Yet, even elite institutional portfolio managers disproportionately focus on the first half of…
Read MoreDo Asset Manager Biases Cannibalize Existing, Still Viable Holdings?
We’re able to better understand the scale of the problem associated with neglect of selling discipline among institutional asset managers thanks to a study released earlier this year, “Selling Fast and Buying Slow: Heuristics and Trading Performance of Institutional Investors.” The research by Klakow Akepanidtaworn, Rick Di Mascio, Alex Imas, and Lawrence Schmidt took the…
Read MoreThe Line Between Chasing Winners And Catching a Falling Knife
A few weeks ago, my family spent a week at the beach. There’s this arcade on the boardwalk. I’m sure you know the kind: Drop a $20 in the change machine, hope your 8-year-old can keep the Skee-Ball in her own lane, and then trade your tickets for some plastic toy that inevitably will provoke…
Read MoreIs it ESG? Or Just a Load of E…‘BS’…G?
Doesn’t it seem like Wall Street can monetize a movement like nobody else? Perhaps that’s what makes it so interesting when one of its own blows the whistle to question authenticity. Tariq Fancy, former Chief Investment Officer of Sustainable Investing at BlackRock, recently provided a scathing opinion piece on the current state of ESG investing.…
Read MoreThe 60/40 Portfolio Problem
My colleague, Brandon Langley, and I began writing about the pitfalls of a traditional 60/40 portfolio back before it was trendy. He and I felt so strongly about the topic that we published a white paper in August of 2018. Some considered us renegades back then for having the audacity to question what had been…
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