Well, maybe we don’t really so much mean United States “against the world” as United States stock market “versus” the rest of the world. In any case, we’ve gotten a few inquiries of late from clients wondering why their portfolios haven’t been soaring as the…
Bad news can be like waves sweeping in and breaking along a sandy shore. The quiet rumble as the watery walls form, break, and lap upon the shingle fades from our conscious awareness until the surge from a sudden harmonic convergence leaves us scrambling for higher ground. It feels like one of those moments right now,…
DFA founder David Booth likes to say, “it’s about ideas,” and we certainly don’t know of another fund company that has been more about ideas than Dimensional Fund Advisors. And not just any ideas, but the best thinking coming out of academic research in the science of economics. …
Few economists have had a greater influence on how we think about the markets and how we structure client portfolios than Gene Fama. We’ve written about Fama and his work before, first to congratulate him on receiving the Nobel Prize in Economics in November of…
The 2014 edition of Dalbar’s long-running study of mutual fund investors (which we’ve written about before) has been released and the results are consistent with every prior edition. Yet again, the numbers suggest that the average stock mutual fund investor tends to buy high and…
By now, most of you are familiar with Michael Lewis’s new book, “Flash Boys” and the whole high-frequency trading (HFT) phenomenon he’s focused on. Lewis has been making the rounds starting with a segment on 60 Minutes a week ago Sunday, followed by the Today…
Our San Francisco financial planning team (Elissa, Dave, Jennifer, and Jen) attended a Financial Planning Association of San Francisco meeting on Tuesday that featured Gary Schlossburg, Senior Economist for Wells Capital Management, presenting on the outlook for the U.S. economy and financial markets into 2015. We thought…
Everyone by now is aware of the great year that the S&P 500 had in 2013, returning more than 32%, its best performance since 1997. We thought this might be a good time to review the overall performance of our clients’ portfolios for the year, not least…