There are two competing ideas around handling financial news. Either check your statements once a year while you try your best to ignore all the news noise. The other is to listen to everything until you learn to filter the news from the noise. Despite what people say, there are pros and cons to both.

I bring this up because the last post highlighted a Seth Klarman interview in which he was asked about how he avoids groupthink. I touched upon it briefly and wanted to expand on it. The answer he gave was an example: Continue Reading…

The returns most investors actually get are very different from the total return advertised by a fund. Put another way, the one thing driving most investment decisions – past total returns – are not what investors actually earn. In reality, investors earn less, and in some cases, a lot less than the total return advertised by a fund.

Morningstar updated its report on the investor returns gap late last week (download the full report at the source link below). The report found that investor returns for the 10 year periods ended 2012 to 2015 fell short – on average – by 1.13%. Continue Reading…

I read a few newsletters to keep me updated on what other people think. One of those is Richard Bernstein’s since he offers monthly research from a top-down, macro view of the economy – something I don’t spend much time on – because it’s nice to get an intelligent viewpoint from that perspective.

His latest newsletter points to one flaw in the current thinking behind what drives bull markets: Continue Reading…