How Lessons from a Navy SEAL Can Make You a Better Investor
By Justin J. Carbonneau “War is a nightmare, war is awful, it is indifferent, devastating and evil. War is hell. But war is also an incredible teacher, a brutal teacher…
Excess Returns, Ep. 11: The Pitfalls of Back Testing
Back testing is one of the most misused tools in investment management. Almost every back test outperforms the market, but those same strategies often struggle when run with actual money.…
Dividend Growth: This Year’s List of Aristocrats
An article in the Motley Fool defines and provides this year’s list of Dividend Aristocrats—companies in the S&P 500 that have paid and increased their base dividends every year for…
Ken French: We Can’t Tell if Value Premium Has Disappeared
In a paper published last month, the team of Eugene Fama and Ken French—credited with identifying the value premium back in 1992—analyzed how the value factor has fared over the…
Retained Earnings a Better Measure than Book Value?
A new study suggests that the book-to-market ratio—long used by value investors to gauge the value of a company– should be replaced by the retained earnings-to-market ratio due to its…
Is Vanguard Getting Too Big for America’s Britches?
Fund manager Vanguard (AUM $6 trillion) has reshaped more than the rural Pennsylvania it calls home, according to an article in the Financial Times that discusses how the firm has…
Humans Dismiss Facts that Run Counter to Their Worldview
While it would seem that factual disputes should be easily resolved with hard facts, according to a recent FastCompany article “things don’t work that way when the scientific consensus presents…
Some Thoughts on the Struggles of Factor Investing in the Past Decade
By Jack Forehand, CFA (@practicalquant)The long-term evidence to support factor investing is compelling. Academic work has shown that factors like value and momentum have produced an excess return relative to…