The latest knock against index funds is that they may be dangerous. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the introduction of the first index mutual fund, making it an opportune occasion for critics to launch new attacks on an ...

Tagged with: David Peartree investing stock market Worth Considering

  Financial intermediaries are the people and institutions that stand between investors and the financial markets. They include banks, investment managers, and insurance companies. The financial crisis of 2008 has prompted much soul-searching about the risks posed by the financial ...

Tagged with: David Peartree Worth Considering

  For most investors money market funds are an uninteresting and largely ignored asset class, except when they need to withdraw cash. Recent money market reforms adopted by the SEC, however, should prompt investors to take a fresh look at ...

Tagged with: David Peartree Worth Considering

  The Federal Reserve’s long-term experiment with low interest rates brings to mind the old quip in the medical profession, “the operation was a success but the patient died.” Technically, all went well, except for the poor patient. Three years ...

Tagged with: David Peartree Worth Considering

Do you really want your bond fund to be “unconstrained?” Here is the dilemma that has bond investors perplexed. They are simultaneously frustrated by stubbornly low interest rates and fearful that rising interest rates will depress the value of their ...

Tagged with: David Peartree Worth Considering

Past investment performance is not predictive of future results, but the urge to extrapolate past outcomes, particularly recent outcomes, into the future is a difficult bias to overcome. It seems wired into investor psychology. The data tell us that few ...

Tagged with: David Peartree Worth Considering

Fear over the prospect of rising interest rates has been hyped and overhyped. For the past six years, the financial media and the marketing departments of mutual fund companies have been stoking investor anxiety over the prospect of rising interest ...

Tagged with: David Peartree Worth Considering

Are commodities an asset class worth owning? We posed that question two years ago (“Evaluating the investment case for commodities,” The Daily Record, Oct. 17, 2013), and found the case to be inconclusive at best. Since then the case for ...

Tagged with: David Peartree Worth Considering

Recent events give investors plenty of reasons to fret about the international markets. The Chinese stock market is in turmoil, the saga in Greece is ongoing, and upheaval in the Middle East is spilling into Europe. Longer stretches of history ...

Tagged with: David Peartree Worth Considering

The most important attribute of a member of an investment committee is not investment expertise. Attorneys, accountants and business people are frequently asked to serve on not-for-profit investment committees because their colleagues assume they know something about managing money. It’s ...

Tagged with: David Peartree Worth Considering

Despite the best efforts and good intentions of the federal government, 401(k) investors remain stubbornly disengaged from their retirement plans. Most have no idea how much they are paying in fees and other expenses. Many assume naively that their plans ...

Tagged with: David Peartree Worth Considering

Exchanged-traded funds have surged in popularity over the past 10 years and increasingly make conventional mutual funds look passé. But are they necessarily a better investment vehicle for the typical investor? ETFs serve the same basic function as mutual funds. ...

Tagged with: David Peartree Worth Considering