“Don’t try to time the market.” This advice has been passed down often by successful investors like Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett, Jack Bogle, and Peter Lynch through the decades. But has this mantra held up in recent decades? After all, investors boast access to more and more timely information than ever and they can trade
Interest bearing bank accounts and very short term fixed income securities now offer their highest returns for decades. This is welcome and means that savers are no longer being penalised for being thrifty or risk averse. For over a decade, cash offered miserly returns, driven down by the drop in the Bank of England Base
In recent weeks, we’ve written several articles about how a strategy of doing nothing –eschewing trading and letting investments ride – would have fared. To sum up, we found a do-nothing strategy would have improved the risk-adjusted performance of the S&P 500 and S&P/TSX Composite index’s holdings. What we didn’t examine was whether a do-nothing approach would
Emerging and frontier markets are often seen by investors as exciting and risky. In this article we try to pin down an investing universe world that spans, at least alphabetically, from Brazil and Vietnam. Organisations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United Nations may have slightly different methodologies for explaining
In this post I will be sharing my thoughts on the strengths that great advisers demonstrate, which some clients may deem as weaknesses. Most mature money management and financial strategies are counterintuitive and against conventional wisdom. Modern media and access to ‘free’ information is maybe our biggest threat and our client’s most destructive influence. The
Financial advisors looking to bring on new clients have a receptive audience following the recent economic turmoil — but they may need to temper some expectations, according to a recent survey. Having to face inflation has made 64% of investors see the importance of professional financial advice, Natixis Investment Managers says it found in a survey of
Can artificial intelligence help pick stocks? More specifically, can investors use AI to determine the fair price of a stock or a bond? I bet a lot of people right now would say yes, given recent advances that allow for the processing of ever greater amounts of information. I think my AI is better than
Last year was one of the worst years ever for financial markets. Call it recency or loss aversion or some other Daniel Kahneman bias but for some reason, our brains are hard-wired to assume big losses will be followed by additional losses (just like we assume big gains will be followed by additional gains).1 The thing about big
Equity exposure can be broadly segmented by market capitalisation (small, mid, and large) and style (value versus growth). Correlations within equity groups tend to be fairly high, although small-cap stocks tend to have the lowest correlations with the broad market. In our recently published 2023 Diversification Landscape Report, however, we found there can be significant
Just over a year ago, Russia invaded Ukraine, an appalling act rightly condemned by the world. In the immediate aftermath, experts weighed the economic impacts, with many projecting sharply higher commodity prices. The prediction made sense: a Russian oil embargo would crimp supply, sending prices higher, or so the thinking held. What happened? Brent crude-oil
