Get new posts by email:

Short Takes: Asset Location, Placebo Effect, and more

Yesterday, regulators went about 10% of the way to eliminating investment industry practices that silently drain money from Canadians’ retirement savings. Maybe in a few years they’ll put a stop to another 10%. Here are my posts for the past two weeks:

The Power of Passive Investing

Blockchain and Cryptocurrency News

Exploiting Innumeracy

Here are some short takes and some weekend reading:

Justin Bender explains that “it’s your post-tax asset allocation that determines your ending portfolio value.” As I explained in a post on Asset Location Errors, there are many people who get asset location decisions wrong because they mix up pre-tax asset allocation and post-tax asset allocation. Justin does an excellent job of explaining these issues in detail with clear examples.

Scott Alexander reports on a research finding that the placebo effect seems to be just mean reversion. There seem to be a great many “results” that owe their existence to poor use of statistics.

Canadian Couch Potato interviews Ben Rabidoux who has a sensible take on real estate as an investment. CCP also discusses how hedge fund returns don’t live up to their reputation, and explains the danger of having some initial success with stock-picking.

Big Cajun Man lists his 5 best investments. The last one might help me with my sore back.

<< Previous Post Next Post >>

Comments

  1. Alan Whitton (Big Cajun Man)June 22, 2018 at 9:49 AM

    Reasonable rates available! Just got to wait until she is licensed. Thanks for the inclusion this week.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Short Takes: InvestorLine’s HISAs, 24-Hour Trading, and more

I recently moved some cash into BMO InvestorLine’s high-interest savings accounts (HISAs) that are structured as mutual funds.  Their designations are BMT104, BMT109, and BMT114, and they purportedly pay 4.35% annual interest (which they can change whenever they like).  However, the way they report the monthly interest payments is so baffling that I wasn’t able to sort it out in my first 15 minutes of trying.  A further complication is the following text in the HISA description: “The Bank may pay, monthly or quarterly, compensation to your Dealer at an annual rate of up to 0.25% of the daily closing balance in the BMO HISA.”  I couldn’t find any evidence of such a charge, but I haven’t been invested for a full quarter, and I can’t yet say that such a charge isn’t buried somehow in the confusing reporting.  I have more digging to do before I can recommend these HISAs. Here are some short takes and some weekend reading: Preet Banerjee explains the dangers of Robi...
Read more

My Asset Allocation

I’ve resisted discussing my asset allocation for some time, but now is finally the time to describe it and the reasons behind it. I’m not holding it out as a model portfolio; I believe it’s suitable for me and not necessarily anyone else. With that warning, enjoy the discussion and feel free to ask questions or take some pot-shots. The main reason why I haven’t discussed my asset allocation in detail before now is that I don’t want readers to treat it like a model portfolio and follow it blindly. Everyone’s situation is different. The need for variation in asset allocation from one investor to the next usually isn’t huge, but there is no one-size-fits-all portfolio. A secondary reason for keeping my asset allocation to myself is that I can’t be sure I’ll never change it. For example, I recently made the minor change of switching from an ETF of small-cap stocks to an ETF of small-cap value stocks . I don’t have any plans to change my current allocation, but I may think differe...
Read more

What to Do About Crazy Stock Valuations

Image
The last time I had to put a lot of effort into thinking about my finances was back when I retired in mid-2017.  I had ideas of how to manage my money after retirement, but it wasn’t until a couple of years had gone by that I felt confident that my long-term plans would work for me.  I had my portfolio on autopilot, and my investing spreadsheet would email me if I needed to take some action. I was fortunate that I happened to retire into a huge bull market.  I got the upside of sequence-of-returns risk.  The downside risk is that stocks will plummet during your early retirement years, and your regular spending will dig deep into your portfolio.  Happily for me, I got the opposite result.  My family’s spending barely made a dent in the relentless rise of the stock market. However, stock prices have become crazy, particularly in the U.S.  One measure of stock priciness is Robert Shiller’s Cyclically Adjusted Price-Earnings (CAPE) ratio .  In the U.S...
Read more

Archive

Show more