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Archive for the ‘Mutual Funds’ Category

Guest post by Contributing Editor, Robert P. Seawright, Chief Investment and Information Officer for Madison Avenue Securities.

Value has persistently outperformed over the long-term.  Why is that?

In the most general terms, growth stocks are those with growing positive attributes – like price, sales, earnings, profits, and return on equity.  Value stocks, on the other hand, are stocks that are underpriced when compared to some measure of their relative value – like price to earnings, price to book, and dividend yield. Thus growth stocks trade at higher prices relative to various fundamental measures of their value because (at least in theory) the market is pricing in the potential for future earnings growth. Over relatively long periods of time, each of these investing classes can and do outperform the other.  For example, growth investing dominated the 1990s while value investing has outperformed since. But value wins over the long haul. (more…)

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I have known Phil DeMuth for a number of years and I admire his common sense and views on many topics.  Phil authored the recently-published book The Affluent Investor that fills a need in the crowded shelves of investment books.  As a financial advisor to high-net-worth families, Phil brings valuable perspective to investors who have built substantial portfolios and seek to protect and grow their wealth effectively. (more…)

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The intent of target date strategies is to provide investors with fully-diversified portfolios that evolve appropriately as investors age.  Target date funds have enjoyed enormous growth over recent years, not least because the Pension Protection Act of 2006 allows employers to direct retirement plan participants into these funds as the default investment option.  Consultancy Casey Quirk projects that target date funds will hold almost half of all assets in 401(k) plans by 2020.

Target Date Folios are an alternative to traditional target date funds, launched on the Folio Investing platform in December of 2007.  These portfolios now have more than five years of performance history.  Prior to the design of the Folios, a detailed analysis of target date funds suggested that they could be considerably improved.  The Folios were designed to provide investors with an enhanced target date solution.  In this article, I will discuss the design and performance of the Folios and target date mutual funds over this tumultuous period.  The risk and return characteristics of these funds and Folios provides insight into the effectiveness of different approaches to portfolio design and diversification.  (more…)

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There is increasing evidence of big flows of money into equities and leaving bonds.  This is being seen at all levels in the market, including among institutional investors such as pension plans.  The Wall Street Journal just published an article discussing this shift called Are Mom and Pop Heading for Wall Street?   Mutual fund flows suggest that investors are finally returning to equities, after selling in droves over the past several years.  This article summarizes the issue:

From April 2009 through now, mutual-fund investors sold a quarter trillion dollars in stock funds, according to recent data from the Investment Company Institute.

Ironically, that selloff coincided with a period of stellar performance in stocks—when the Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped more than 60%. (more…)

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In a recent post, I presented a list of the ‘core asset classes’ that investors need in order to build portfolios that fully exploit available diversification opportunities.  That article focused on portfolios designed for total return potential, the combined return from price appreciation and income generated by the assets in the portfolio.  For investors focusing on building income-generating portfolios, the core asset classes are somewhat different.  In this article, I present a proposed set of core asset classes for income-focused investors, along with examples of representative funds.  (more…)

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Guest post by Contributing Editor, Matthew Amster-Burton, Mint.com.

Do we live in the golden age of investing?

Moronic question, right? Of course we don’t. The S&P 500 sits at about the same level it did five years ago. Bond interest rates have never been lower, and the Fed says it’s planning to keep them that way through mid-2015.

Turn on any financial channel and you’ll find as many gloomy predictions as you care to sit through: debt-fueled implosion in Europe, the next flash crash, the shrinking dollar, a stagnant labor market, Great Depression 2.0 (or is it 3.0 by now?). (more…)

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A new article in Knowledge@Wharton highlights a body of research that suggests that the universe of public companies is very different than in the past.  There are, for example, 44% fewer publicly-listed companies on U.S. exchanges than there were only fifteen years ago.  The Wharton article is a review of a range of work, including both experts who believe that we are seeing a decline in the role and significance of public firms and those who conclude that we are seeing a natural part of the business cycle.  In the late 90’s, it seemed as though every small company, with or without a proven product of earnings, was rushing to cash in on IPO fever.  Many of these companies subsequently failed.  Today, after a decade of weak market performance and with individual investors increasingly skeptical of the stock market, it is not surprising that fewer firms are going public.  The Wharton article also cites increased oversight and regulation of public companies as encouraging firms to remain private. (more…)

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The market rally of the past twelve months may appear somewhat baffling in light of the fact that individual investors have been pulling money out of the market.  The S&P 500 is up 22.5% in the last year, while September marks the 17th consecutive month during which investors took money out of equity mutual funds.  The outflows from equity mutual funds are not simply due to investors moving from mutual funds to ETFs.  A recent analysis by Bianco Research demonstrates that including ETF flows does not change the results. (more…)

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Effective Actions in an Uncertain World: Part Five of Our Special Five Part Series

There are a number of factors that we need to predict in order to come up with saving and investing strategies for retirement.  The values that we assign to these factors will have a huge impact on whether or not we will be able to meet our goals.  First, there is the expected return that investors will make on their retirement savings.  Second, there is the common estimate that people will need about 85% of their pre-retirement income to support them once they stop working.  Finally, there is the potential impact of behavior on savings rates, investing, and spending.  (more…)

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Realities of Investing: Part Three of Our Special Five Part Series

In the various calculations that project retirement portfolio accumulations through time (such as the two discussed in the previous article), there are assumptions about how investors will allocate their savings and how those investments will perform.  In the case of the Fidelity study, no specific asset allocation is provided that would achieve the assumed risk-free 5.5% annual return.  In the Ibbotson study, the authors assume that investors hold a combination of a stock index fund and a bond index fund that progressively allocates less to stocks and more to bonds as investors get older.  The Ibbotson study also assumes that the stock index (the S&P 500) will have an average annual return of 10.96% per year and that the bond index will have an average return of 4.6% per year.  The Ibbotson study ignores expenses associated with investing. (more…)

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