October 2015

The Best of the Best

When the average person tries their hand at stock picking, they’ll go on the internet and check the price-to-earnings ratio. Maybe they’ll dig a little deeper and look at the some other statistics. They’ll check the institutional ownership, look at the competition, look at its historical valuation, growth rates, debt levels, etc. If you’ve played…

The Power of Defense

Good defense is more important than good offense not just on the football field, but on the investing field as well. Stocks experienced double-digit drawdowns in each of the last eleven decades, with the pain averaging -38%. Let’s take a look at some of the gains and losses to get a better feel of how…

The Growth of Alternative Indexes

Investors have become enamored with alternative ways to slice and dice the indices. According to Morningstar, “Strategic Beta” now accounts for 21% of total industry (ETP) assets, up from under 5% in 2000.  As assets have exploded, so too has the number of strategic-beta ETPs, which have grown from 673 to 844 in the past year,…

Annual Stock Market Returns

After a strong year for stocks, does it make sense for investors to dampen their expectations? That’s what many investors, professional or otherwise, were saying heading into 2014, following a year when stocks made new all-time highs and gained ~30 percent. Looking at the data shows that stocks have actually performed better than average following…

A Junky Rally

Stocks are continuing to rally from deeply oversold conditions. While the rebound is welcome, it’s worth taking look under the hood to see whats driving the recent performance. Here are the YTD returns for the six strongest stocks in the S&P 500 today: FCX: -45% JOY: -63% CNX: -66% WYNN: -52% SNI: -28% GNW: -36%…

Inside the Market of Stocks

Over the last five and ten years, less than twenty percent of large-cap managers beat their benchmark. Should we be surprised to see that eighty percent of these funds fail to deliver returns above the S&P 500? Let’s turn to the data. On average, 50.6% of stocks beat the market in any given year. This…