Occam’s Razor: One of the Most Successful Active Managers of All Time Shows Why Active Management Doesn’t Work

WHAT IS OCCAM’S RAZOR? Occam’s Razor is a principle attributed to William Occam, a 14th century philosopher. He stressed that explanations must not be multiplied beyond what is necessary. Thus, Occam’s Razor is a term used to “shave off” or dismiss superfluous explanations for a given event. This concept is largely ignored within the investment management landscape. This newsletter…

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2017 – Q1 Quarterly Market Review

This report features world capital market performance and a timeline of events for the last quarter. It begins with a global overview, then features the returns of stock and bond asset classes in the US and international markets. The report also illustrates the performance of globally diversified portfolios and features a topic of the quarter.…

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4 Ways to Manage Sequence of Returns Risk in Retirement

Sequence of returns risk, or sequence risk for short, is the risk that you will need to take distributions from your investment portfolio when the market has recently declined. Taking distributions when the market has gone down effectively “costs” more than at other points in time because you are forced to sell your investments at…

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Review: 11 ways to reduce next year’s tax bill

Hopefully you’ve been able to close the books on last year’s taxes by now. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore them for another year. Now’s the time to make sure that you are doing everything you can to minimize your taxes in the future. This article has some suggestions on how to make sure…

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What is the Stock Market?

The stock market is confusing. When you talk about it, people tend to nod their heads sagely and make bland comments, like they do with most things relating to the economy. We know it’s important, and most of us hope it will provide us the retirement we want – but we don’t actually understand it,…

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Indexes 101, Part 2: Why So Many Indexes?

Remember when the financial media was positively giddy over the fact that the Dow Jones hit 20,000 points earlier this year (and we weren’t so impressed)? In part one of this series, we looked at what exactly the “points” measure in market indexes (not always what you might expect, as it turns out). Today, I…

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