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5/21/2013 7:30 PM
Michael Lewis authored “Moneyball” back in 2003, and it seems like it immediately captured the attention of baseball fans and insiders everywhere. Since that time, its concepts have been applied to numerous areas including basketball, which is in the midst of a seismic shift in how basketball is evaluated and what skills and actions contribute th.... 4/30/2013 10:40 AM
Many pundits (and a good number of individual investors) have been predicting high inflation as a result of the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy. Over the four years ending 2012, inflation has averaged just 2.2 percent per year, and currently the market expects inflation over the next five years to be just 2.1 percent per year. Clearly, realized inflation has been low and the market expects inflation to be low in the future, which can hardly be interpreted as signs that high inflation is a foregone conclusion. This .... 4/17/2013 2:09 PM
The past year or so has provided a vibrant debate about the long-term returns stock market investors should expect. Part of this discussion has been driven by the long-term return assumptions used by public pension plans in the U.S. It’s also been driven by the great stock market performance of the past few years and how that should impact long-term expected returns. Further, some investors seem to be worri.... 4/9/2013 5:17 PMLate in 2012, I reviewed the mid-year 2012 Standard & Poor’s Indices Versus Active scorecard. S&P has since updated the scorecard through year-end 2012, and I wanted to quickly hit on some of its findings. I’ll focus on the five-year results since those are long enough to actually begin drawing mea.... 4/2/2013 5:21 PM
As the number of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) has multiplied, the number of sector ETFs has exploded. There are now ETFs that cover every sector of the U.S. stock market imaginable (health care, telecommunications, consumer discretionary, etc.) and even international and emerging markets sector ETFs. Lost in all this is the general finding that sectors really aren’t that important, particularly over longer periods of time.
The long-term returns of most.... 2/27/2013 2:26 PM
With interest rates on intermediate- and long-term bonds ticking up a good bit over the beginning of the year, many investors are refocusing on the potential risk within bond portfolios. (As one data point iShares 20+ Treasury ETF is down about 1.8 percent year-to-date.) For many bond portfolios, that risk can come from either interest rate risk or credit risk. Here I’ll focus on interest rate risk.
The potential interest rate risk in a bond or bond fund portfolio is largely determ....
2/14/2013 9:20 AM
You might think finding accurate bond fund yield information would be simple. From my experience, you’d be wrong. It’s incredibly difficult to sort through the myriad of yield measures published by the fund companies themselves or third parties like Morningstar, or even dictated by regulatory bodies like the SEC.
The Gold Standard: Yield-to-Maturity
A good rule of thumb is to ignore any yield measure other than yield-to-maturity (and possibly yield-....
2/6/2013 3:57 PM
I was forwarded an article by Jane Bryant Quinn from 2011 arguing that individual bonds are generally a bad deal. She aptly notes that many bond ladders are inappropriately sold to investors by stock brokers, which I agree with, but many of her conclusions as to why bond ladders are bad are based on faulty assumptions. I’ll selectively cover her com.... 1/23/2013 3:21 PM
Now that we have a bit of certainty around taxation (in 2013 at least…hopefully…right?) I wanted to explore some of the high level implications.
Ordinary income and capital gains
The newly instituted 39.6 percent marginal federal tax rate and the Medicare surtax of 3.8 percent means the burden of short-term capital gains and ordinary income has .... 1/15/2013 4:09 PM
This post is obviously a bit anecdotal, but I’ve been thinking about three prominent predictions from the past few years and analyzing those predictions relative to what the market was forecasting and what academic research had to say. The three predictions were:
- Interest rates would increase so, you should stick to short-term bonds (if investing in bonds at all).
- The municipal market would experience significant trouble in 2011.
- ....
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 | Jared Kizer
Director of
Investment Strategy
BAM Advisor Services
(see bio)
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