The Stock Picker’s Quest for Alpha
Among academics, the active-versus-passive debate often centres on mutual funds. But among DIY investors—who readily concede that mutual funds with high fees are unlikely to outperform an index strate [...]
Among academics, the active-versus-passive debate often centres on mutual funds. But among DIY investors—who readily concede that mutual funds with high fees are unlikely to outperform an index strate [...]
I’ve never been shy about criticizing actively managed mutual funds, but I’m starting to think this debate is getting old. More than that, I feel like it’s driving a wedge between people who should be [...]
In 1951, a Princeton University student wrote a thesis about the mutual fund industry. “Funds can make no claim to superiority over the investment averages,” wrote the scholar, who would go on to crea [...]
Joel Greenblatt has a sense of humour—I’ll grant him that. In The Big Secret for the Small Investor (Wiley, 2011), he pokes fun at the crass title of his previous book, You Can Be a Stock Market Geniu [...]
You don’t need a lot of mathematical horsepower to be a Couch Potato investor. Indeed, simplicity is one of the strategy’s virtues: just keep your costs low, diversify widely, and stick to the plan. B [...]
I know very few people who began their investing lives as Couch Potatoes. Most started out in mutual funds or as stock pickers and, somewhere along the line, realized they were overpaying and underper [...]
Advocates of active management admit that only a minority of mutual funds will outperform their benchmarks, but they argue there is still a significant probability of success. According to the data Ri [...]
Today we take it for granted that virtually all mutual funds and stock pickers are trying to earn higher returns than the overall market — or at least earn the same returns with lower risk. But Rick F [...]
This post is the last in a series in which I share some insights from my recent interview with Meir Statman, one of the world’s leading scholars of behavioural finance. At the end of the post, I’ll te [...]
These are good times to be a Canadian equity investor. Not only have we enjoyed back-to-back banner years — the S&P/TSX Composite returned over 35% in 2009 and 17% last year— but Canadian stocks h [...]