Investing

Time and again throughout my career I have ranted about the nonsense of benchmarking in all its forms. By now I have given up on the hope that business and investing will ever leave the practice behind, so I don’t expect this post to change anything except to make me […]

“We don’t think we were wrong. We think we were early.” A cringe-worthy answer that rings alarm bells for investment consultants. Higher inflation, increased market volatility, and more variable nominal interest rates are significant opportunities for active managers who can demonstrate their value with differentiated, customer-centric products. But with active […]

In the first installment of my interview with Vineer Bhansali, the author of The Incredible Upside-Down Fixed-Income Market from the CFA Institute Research Foundation, we addressed the underlying implications of negative-yielding bonds, whether they constituted a net negative or positive. While Bhansali, who is also CIO of LongTail Alpha, eschewed […]

How does an organization attract and engage its various stakeholders? An inspiring purpose articulated in a mission statement may be one of the most effective methods. The author Simon Sinek presents an even simpler concept in his book Start with Why. Sinek believes that what differentiates great leaders, companies, and […]

Measuring corporate impact is time-consuming and resource intensive. Until recently, I worked at UN PRI and witnessed first-hand the significant challenges investors, employees, and customers face in finding trustworthy, comparable data to assess the net impact of companies. CFA Institute Research and Policy Center’s Climate Data in the Investment Process […]

Warren Buffett: Inside the Ultimate Money Mind. 2021. Robert G. Hagstrom, CFA. Wiley & Sons. Over the past two decades, Robert G. Hagstrom, CFA, has written several books about Warren Buffett. This new book, however, is unique in its focus on the investment thought process. Many books, videos, discussions, and […]

In private equity (PE), there are more ways to calculate the alpha of a portfolio or fund than any other asset class. And in no sector other than private markets does investing in the average fund seem to go so poorly. Should it be this way? Is the average private […]

Central banks took a huge leap on the road to direct market intervention in 2020. All developed market central banks added direct purchases of corporate bonds to their quantitative easing (QE) programs. As of 31 December 2020, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the US Federal Reserve held €250 billion […]

We are on the cusp of a major shift in financial, political, and social power from Baby Boomers toward Millennials that, combined with digitization and monetary policy shifts, will continue to drive regulatory changes supporting the adoption of cryptoassets. Regulation is often cited as a key factor hindering adoption of […]

After the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) was developed in the 1960s and 1970s, financial researchers started to test how well this theoretical model actually worked in the real world. Amid expanding computing power and greater data access, the 1980s became a critical era for gauging CAPM’s validity as analysts […]