Investing involves volatility. The higher the expected return, the greater the volatility. This is axiomatic. You can’t avoid it but you can mitigate it, as I wrote in a previous column. And it turns out that reducing volatility has a number of benefits for investors. First, there’s what’s known as volatility drag. This is a…
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That doesn’t sound right, does it? Who would ever want to underperform the stock market? Shouldn’t the goal be to consistently beat the market? That would be great, but how easy is it to do? S&P Global produces an annual report called SPIVA (https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/spiva/spiva-us-mid-year-2023.pdf) which compares how actively managed funds – those that attempt to…
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For many years the only way to purchase cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin has been through unregulated private exchanges. And investing in such digital assets has not been for the faint of heart. Aside from the extreme volatility of the assets themselves, the exchanges have suffered a number of high-profile failures. In 2022 alone Terraform, Celsius,…
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How many times have you heard the phrase “This Time Is Different?” In the context of investing it usually means something fundamental has changed in the way capital markets operate. The implied consequence is that you can no longer rely on the way things worked in the past to make investment decisions about the future.…
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When it comes to equity investing, the difference between luck and skill is primarily a matter of consistency. If you choose to invest in a fund or ETF designed to passively track some stock market index you are practically guaranteed to get market returns. Of course you need to make sure to utilize funds that…
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