We often strive for what's good, better and best. Why stay at a 3-star hotel when we can stay at a 5-star hotel? Many of us invest in the same way. Why buy a 3-star fund when we can invest in a 5-star fund? Because investors misunderstand and misuse star ratings and the PR departments [...]
Kudos to Barry Ritholtz for yet another pragmatic and useful article. The list is in reverse order so #1 has the least impact relative to #7 which has the most.
Channeling his inner Benjamin Graham (in the ST markets are a voting machine tallying popularity - in the LT markets are a weighing machine assessing substance) Josh Brown wrote this fantastic piece about why stock prices are a proxy about our beliefs about the future. By definition hope/faith (belief in the absence of evidence) is [...]
Frequent readers of the Apollo blog know of our, um, “love” for Big Media and the content-for-the-sake-of-content weapons-grade BS it spews. Given the importance of being fair we’ll give credit where due. Here’s an article actually worth reading: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-you-probably-have-less-money-invested-in-stocks-than-you-should-2018-05-23 For every Paleo diet, juice cleanse and the like there’s one tried and true way to [...]
Oh how times have changed. Vanguard, the 800-pound gorilla of the mutual fund industry, is rapidly approaching its 50th birthday. We thought it would be interesting to see how the firm has grown through the years: At the beginning Vanguard managed $1.5 billion in assets. Today that number has ballooned to $4.5 trillion. That's 3x [...]
Really enjoyed this graphic: So many applications to life. Knowing what we know, knowing what we don't and knowing there's so much more to learn. It's so important to know where we stand. We are what we are...not what we think we are.
We thoroughly enjoyed this piece by Morgan Housel. Highlighted are some of our favorite passages. Patience is indeed a virtue!
The good ol’ S&P 500. An index comprised of the 500 largest U.S. stocks as measured by market capitalization. We know it. We love it. It’s everywhere. It’s easy to understand. We can buy funds and ETFs that track it. Let’s take a moment to give the S&P 500 a big hug. We love you [...]
Roughly 10% of stock market activity can be attributed to real-life humans deciding which stock(s) to buy/sell. Another 40% or so reflect decisions to invest in a specific industry or the entire market through indexes and ETFs. This means half of all stock market activity is done automatically by Alexa “bots”/computers/algorithms. And since there must [...]
With apologies to the ubiquitous series we’ve co-opted the title in order to share the single most wonderful piece of investment advice we’ve read in a long, long time. Buried in an article about Dollar Cost Averaging vs. Lump Sum Investing is this gem: “Ultimately the best solution is the one that gets an investor [...]