Worth Reading

Hiring Good Managers is Hard?  Ha!  Try Keeping Them – Article by John West and Amie Ko of Research Affiliates about the challenge of manager selection

Introducing Vanguard’s New Alphabet ETFs – Great piece by Vanguard’s Joel Dickson about the dangers of backtesting

Forecasting Stock Returns – Vanguard examines how well data points (everything from P/E to rainfall) predict the market – spoiler alert: not well

S&P Research – Research from Standard & Poors – Check out the SPIVA and Persistence scorecards

Letting go of the Why  – Ben Carlson on keeping perspective while investing

Faulty Wall Street Assumptions – Another Ben Carlson gem covering a wide range of topics

Forecasting Quotes – A list of quotes regarding forecasting assembled by ValueWalk

The Skew – Michael Batnick breaks down the why behind a great Bloomberg article about how difficult it is to beat an index like the S&P 500

Even God Would Get Fired as an Active Investor – Wes Gray with a great take on how hard it is to stick with even an omniscient money manager

When Things Get Wild – Morgan Housel “There are two ways to prepare for wild times: You can expect them to come, or you can predict when they’ll come… The former isn’t hard and helps, latter is extremely difficult and often backfires.”

Cheap is Great, But Free Will Cost You – Barry Ritholtz – “Whenever a company offers something at no charge, that means the price is hidden and out of sight.” I’d include so-called financial advice from banks in this list.

The McRib Effect – Nick Maggiulli – Confusing correlation with causation – the McRib as a market timing indicator.