For all their virtues, mutual funds have some serious flaws. To their credit, mutual funds can provide things that most investors desire, things like broad diversification, transparent holdings, good liquidity and easy trading. Unfortunately, most mutual also have serious performance ...

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In recent years, we have heard mutual funds characterized as outdated and inferior to the newer type of pooled investment known as exchange-traded funds or ETFs. Are they? ETFs are certainly newer and more innovative. New fund launches in recent ...

Tagged with: David Peartree Worth Considering

Today’s U.S stock market is very different from the stock market of 40 or even 20 years ago. To start, the universe of publicly traded stocks has become much smaller. There are fewer listed stocks than in the past. The ...

Tagged with: David Peartree Worth Considering

Investors should compare their investment performance against an appropriate market benchmark. Let’s take a look at why and how to do it. Benchmarking refers to setting reasonable expectations for investment performance using broad market indices. Many investors will instinctively look ...

Tagged with: David Peartree Worth Considering

Investors are shifting away from actively managed funds and towards passively managed funds. The financial media have interpreted this as a “seismic” shift from active to passive investing, but they probably overstate, or perhaps they misunderstand, what is occurring. Lost ...

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Warren Buffett has won his 10-year bet against a group of hedge funds. The story of the bet is not widely known despite coverage by the financial press, but it holds a valuable lesson for investors. Here is the exact ...

Tagged with: David Peartree Worth Considering

Adopting what is loosely referred to as a “buy-and-hold” approach to investing can make great sense for a long-term investor so long as it is properly understood and does not turn into “set-it-and-forget-it.” The “forget it” part can be problematic. ...

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The latest SPIVA report by S&P Dow Jones offers a mix of old and new news about the performance of active investment managers. What’s new is that their scoring of performance for the first time extends over 15 years, a ...

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The absence of a uniform standard for reporting investment performance presents a challenge for investors. As a rule, investment advisers are not required to report investment performance and, even if they do, there is no uniform standard for how the ...

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Correctly measuring investment performance is a problem for many investors. The problem has two parts. First, many investors don’t even bother to measure their investment performance. Most brokerage account statements do not report the investment performance for the period in ...

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Financial columnist Jane Bryant Quinn famously coined the phrase “financial porn” to describe much of the content produced by the financial press. She was referring to the stories and other items in the financial press designed to “tickle our prurient ...

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The era of rising rates may be upon us, or not. Time will tell, but it’s clear at least that interest rates have been on the rise since the second half of 2016 and especially since the election. The yield ...

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