Due Diligence Pick Good Funds Posted on October 25, 2016April 13, 2017 By Matt The Wall Street Journal and the financial community have been abuzz about passive investing. I wrote about settling for average and outrunning a bear via active management previously. The newest argument for choosing active management over passive is that investors should choose ‘good’ managers, not average or bad managers. Why… Read more
Investing Active Versus Passive in a Down Market Posted on October 23, 2016October 21, 2016 By Matt The Wall Street Journal has been publishing articles about passive investing recently. Many of these articles look like they are pro-passive, but are written by active management shops looking to damn passive with faint praise. My last post addressed the ‘settle for average returns’ fallacy. The second argument I often… Read more
Investing Why Settle for Average? Posted on October 21, 2016 By Matt With the recent flood of Wall Street Journal articles about passive investing, now is a good time to review the space. Money is pouring into firms like Vanguard and iShares, the leaders in the indexing revolution. Investors are seeing that despite perennial declarations of a “stock-picker’s market”, active managers consistently… Read more
Investing Eight Years Ago Posted on October 14, 2016 By Matt Eight years ago, we were in the midst of financial crisis. Warren Buffett penned an op-ed in the New York Times encouraging investors to “Buy American, I Am”. So did you buy American? Too many investors were scrambling to do the opposite. On the front page of the New York… Read more
Fairway Harvard’s Endowment Posted on October 5, 2016October 5, 2016 By Matt Fairway’s third quarter commentary has been published. Keeping up with the Joneses has distracted Harvard’s endowment from its true mission. Here is some background on what happened: First, the actual endowment report. Harvard lost 2% over the last year, driven into the ground by what I call conspicuous sophistication. The… Read more