Do the terms “upward sloping equity glide paths” and “bond tents” seem unfamiliar to you? They are terms that financial planning researchers are using to describe investment strategies designed to mitigate “sequence risk,” the risk that your portfolio returns will occur in the wrong order, thereby negatively impacting the amount of income your retirement account…
If you are looking for a movie about power, money, sex, drugs, yachts, Lamborghinis, high-pressure sales tactics, stock manipulation, sex, and drugs (did I mention sex and drugs?) then go see the new Martin Scorsese movie, The Wolf of Wall Street, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. The film is based on the memoirs of Jordan Belfort, the…
In a recent “Your Money” column in the New York Times, John Wasik did a great job of delivering the status quo message about portfolio expenses. He reminds us that John C. Bogle, Founder of the Vanguard Group, and many others, have performed studies that demonstrated that active managers cannot beat a passive index because…
I have been on the road quite a bit recently, appearing at several professional conferences around the country. One fellow speaker at a conference in San Diego was Dr. Christopher Geczy, a finance professor at the Wharton School and the new academic director of the Wharton Wealth Management Initiative. His impressive resume features a B.A.…
The way we explain our process for managing portfolios has significantly changed over the past few years. It seems that both retail and institutional investors want to hear more about how ‘the sausage is made’ than they did a decade ago. And why not? The financial markets have been difficult to navigate since the market…
Just two days ago the 4th quarter GDP came out as a negative number, which was much worse than expected. In fact, not one of 83 analysts had anticipated a negative number, meaning they were all too bullish on the 4th quarter growth number. But yesterday the Chicago Purchasing manager’s index, a growth barometer, was…
In my last column, I described a bearish scenario where the markets come to the realization that the monetary authorities are out of bullets. This was simply an exercise in critical thinking and doesn’t actually line up with our current forecast, and I did promise I would come back with a bullish scenario.
Most Pinnacle Advisory Group clients are familiar with our view of secular (or very long-term) market cycles. My partner, Michael Kitces, and I first published a paper on secular bear markets in the Journal of Financial Planning in 2006, where we predicted correctly that stock prices were likely to deliver much less than average returns…
October 31rst marked the ten-year anniversary of Pinnacle’s Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS) compliant track record. That’s a big deal in the institutional investment community — it means that we’ve met the GIPS standard for reporting performance (often required by institutional investors). It also means that we have a legitimate ten-year track record, which is…
“Is poker more a game of skill or of chance?”
