Category Archives: investing

From Evan Newmark: Miller’s Value Trust Fund, Legg Mason’s flagship, just passed another milestone. As of the end of May, according to Morningstar, the fund is now underperforming the S&P 500 over a 10-year period. This isn’t (only) a how-the-mighty-are-fallen … Continue reading →

Cast your mind back, if you will, to those halcyon days of early 2007, when credit was easy and equities looked attractive. Back then, an aggressive investor might well have locked in low long-term borrowing costs and invested the proceeds … Continue reading →

It’s taken long enough, but finally Barclays and Vanguard are offering genuinely global ETFs: the iShares MSCI ACWI fund, and the Total World Stock fund, respectively. (The latter’s launching next month.) This is great: rather than having to laboriously construct … Continue reading →

Floyd Norris today brings up the question of mutual fund fees, which gives me a good excuse to revisit the ETF-squareds I wrote about yesterday. By coming up with an extra service (quarterly rebalancing) they justify an extra 25bp in … Continue reading →

I had a lovely lunch with Roger Ehrenberg this afternoon, and we talked among other things about the big buy-side firms such as Warburg Pincus, Fortress, and the like – companies who seem to be able to raise huge amounts … Continue reading →

In the debate over active vs passive investing, the base-case assumption is that a passive investment involves tracking a stock-market index, normally the S&P 500. But of course stock-market indices are actively managed, with listing requirements and changing components and … Continue reading →

One of the weirder aspects of this financial crisis is that in most cases the amount of harm suffered by any given entity seems to have been directly proportional to the degree of financial sophistication that entity had. Structured products … Continue reading →

Steve Waldman doesn’t like it when I defend passive investing. If everybody moved to a passive-investment style, he asks, then where would we be? We need active investors to make efficient markets and set prices. Passive investors, he says quite … Continue reading →

The cost of active investing: $100 billion per year, according to Kenneth French at Dartmouth University. That’s up from just $7 billion in 1980, you can see why Wall Street has made so much money in the interim. In his … Continue reading →

What are we to make of the fact that Brian Wesbury’s bullish outlook piece in the WSJ spent much of the day atop the most popular list? The first thought is that it’s a bearish sign: so long as there’s … Continue reading →

Julian Robertson is making lots of money – and, he says, "it’s wonderfully fun". This is a sentiment one doesn’t hear very often from hedge-fund managers, who tend to have high-stress lives and demanding investors. The solution to that problem? … Continue reading →

I’m fascinated by this profile of Jonathan Steinberg and his Wisdom Tree ETFs. Instead of going overweight companies with the highest market capitalization, as most index funds do, Steinberg’s funds go overweight companies with the highest dividends. Wisdom Tree’s Jeremy … Continue reading →

According to Michael Lewis, one of the standard ways in which a stockbroker tries to sell a stock to a small investor is by invoking the hallowed name of Warren Buffett. The intuition is clear: Warren Buffett became a multi-billionaire … Continue reading →