The Wall Street Journal gave Yale’s David Swensen an ‘A+’ today. He’s managed Yale’s top performing endowment over the past 20 years and the WSJ reported that his 28% return (for the fiscal year ending June 30th) again topped all other $1billion+ endowments that have reported their results thus far.
Swensen is known for his [...]

read more from this topic.....

Chances are pretty good that your investments did well last year since the markets were up overall. The question is, what should we consider “good” performance?
In order to be able to answer that question, you first need to look at how you really did. If you have an investment account that you didn’t [...]

read more from this topic.....

I was recently reading about the possible end of Bill Miller’s win streak against the S&P500 Index. His Legg Mason Value Fund has beaten the S&P500 for an impressive 15 years in a row. However, this year he’s trailing the index by about 10% at this point. The manager with the next [...]

read more from this topic.....

Underweight overvalued stocks and overweight undervalued stocks. Sounds like a simple recipe for beating the markets. Essentially, that’s the idea behind what some have called the next step in the evolution of indexing.
The argument is that traditional capitalization-weighted indexes (such as the S&P 500) by their very nature will overweight stocks that are [...]

read more from this topic.....

Earlier this month, Morningstar announced that it is going to begin reporting what they call “Morningstar Investor Return” in addition to the traditional time-weighted returns of mutual funds. Time-weighted returns are the returns that you usually read about. They are the return that you would have received on your investment had you put [...]

read more from this topic.....

How are active managers doing compared to indexes this year? As cited in Sunday’s New York Times article by Paul Lim, so far through September 30th of this year, only 28.5% of actively managed large cap mutual funds were beating the S&P 500 index according to a new study by Standard and Poors. [...]

read more from this topic.....

David Swensen has been investment manager of Yale’s endowment for 21 years. Over that time he’s averaged a 16% annual return, better than any other endowment, pension, or foundation over that time period. Yale’s $18 billion endowment is noted for including investments in many alternative areas, such as private equity, venture capital, timber, [...]

read more from this topic.....

You may have heard in yesterday’s news that the Dow closed at a record high, but what is the Dow really?
When people refer to the Dow, they are talking about the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA). It is an index of just 30 U.S. stocks, picked by the editors of the Wall Street Journal. [...]

read more from this topic.....

Last week, I mentioned that E-Loan just came out with its version of the online savings account, offering 5.50% APY. At the end of the week, Emigrant Direct LOWERED its rate to 5.05%, matching HSBC Direct’s current rate. It’s the first time in recent memory that a major online savings bank lowered its [...]

read more from this topic.....

While hedge funds have been in the news a lot lately as one of the “hot” investment choices, Amaranth hedge funds’ recent meltdown serves as a reminder that there’s no such thing as a sure bet–even among the “smart money” which had invested over $9 billion as of the beginning of September. It seems [...]

read more from this topic.....