Hot Off the Web– March 1, 2009 In Jason Zweig’s WSJ piece entitled “After the crash, Stocks may face a long road back”, reports based on historical evidence (Dimson, Marsh and Staunton of London Business Scholl) it is expected (i.e. 50% chance) to take nine years for markets to recover to 2007 highs. The data […]

Hot Off the Web- February 22, 2009 Surprise?!? “The index funds win again” The NYT article by Mark Hulbert reports that in a new study by Mark Kritzman he concluded that over a hypothetical 20 year period passive returns of 10% outperform active mutual fund returns of 13.5% and hedge fund returns of 19%, once […]

Hot Off the Web– February 15, 2009 WSJ’s Kevin Helliker reports that “You might as well face it: You are addicted to success” It’s bad enough that with the growing number of job losses people lose their livelihoods, but the problem is aggravated with the “unmitigated identification of self with occupation, accomplishment and professional status” […]

Hot Off the Web- February 8, 2009 AsianInvestor’s Jame DiBiasio reports that “Pimco rolls out GDP-based bond funds” “The Global Advantage Bond Index, “Gladi” for short, is based on market GDP rather than on capitalisation. The problem with the Lehman AGG, which has been the de facto standard for the past decade, is that the […]

Hot Off the Web– February 1, 2009 In a very interesting NYT article “American Express kept a (very) watchful eye on charges” Ron Lieber talks about the “big brother” credit card companies scrutinizing your purchases, not just looking for potentially fraudulent ones. Recently American Express cut customers’ credit lines based on what establishments they shopped […]

Hot Off the Web- January 18, 2009 The disaster story of the week (at least for me, an ex employee with almost 30 years of service and now an underfunded pension plan) was that Nortel filed for bankruptcy protection. You can read the take of the Globe and Mail in “Nortel files for bankruptcy protection” […]

Hot Off the Web- January 11, 2009 John Bogle’s “Six lessons for investors” in the WSJ are: (1) beware of market forecasts (unreliable even from experts), (2) never underrate importance of asset allocation (“a good place to start is a bond percentage equals your age”), (3) mutual funds with superior performance often falter, (4) owning […]

Hot Off the Web- January 4, 2009 S&P/Case-Shiller housing index October numbers are out and the devastation continues Phoenix, Miami, Las Vegas are down 30-35% from last year and 3-4% from last month; the multicity composite indices are also down about 18% from last year and 2% from last month. Prices are now back to […]

Hot Off the web- December 28, 2008 Craig Karmin’s “Say goodbye and good riddance to 2008…” in the WSJ summarizes it well, that 2008 was “a year when the most dire financial predictions finally came true”. He then enumerates the sorry list: U.S. stock market off about 40% (worst in 77 years), emerging market down […]

Hot Off the Web- December 21, 2008 Bad enough that  the recent market crash has damaged many retirees’ and would be retirees’ nest eggs to the tune of 15-40% depending on the asset allocation, but some investors who become victims of Ponzi schemes (everyone has heard of the one perpetrated by Madoff) appear to be […]