I went to the Dimensional Science of Investing conference in October 2014. Conferences are usually pretty boring but this one was enlightening. Held over two days, they didn’t talk about funds but where returns come from (for advisors reading this, if you haven’t been to it, get yourself an invite to one). After that, I […]
We talk to clients about investment risk all the time. But the whole system around investment risk is wrong and it is doing a disservice to clients and it is resulting in them losing money. ESMA Ratings Life companies use the ESMA rating system to assess the risk of their funds. There is a rating […]
There was an online pile on recently when podcast host Joe Rogan challenged the Dean for the National School of tropical Medicine, Professor Peter Hotez to debate anti vaxxer Robert Kennedy Jr. Twitter owner, Elon Musk, then threw his weight behind Rogan and Kennedy. What did Hotez do? He accused Rogan of broadcasting disinformation on […]
A couple of Friday’s ago, while cooking dinner on the barbeque, I was flicking through Twitter on my phone. One tweet read that a liquidator had been appointed to Blackbee Investments in Cork. While I never used any of their products, I have a client who invested a considerable amount of money into one of […]
We saw the collapse of two major banks in the US with Silicon Valley Bank in California and Signature Bank in New York failing. In Europe, Credit Suisse had to borrow up to $54 billion from the Swiss central bank. What happened and should we be worried that there will be another collapse of the […]
There were a couple of really good articles last week about the quick collapse of wealth. The first one in the Financial Times was about the final hours of FTX. It was a fascinating insight into the collapse of a company once worth $40 billion. Its founder Sam Bankman-Fried had a personal wealth of $20 […]
For years, tech stocks were all the rage. The Nasdaq 100 post double digit returns for eight of the ten years up to the end of 2021. The other two years posted returns of 4.58% and 9.91% (you could round this up to double digits!). With returns over 30% for last three of those years, […]
There was a time when if you wanted to invest, you had to go to a stockbroker and they would place the trades for you. They earned a commission on placing the trades, so it was only worth their while making sizable investing. In other words, you had to be rich to invest. Current Day […]
2022 has been a horrible year for investors. Inflation continues to be high, interest rates have been increased agressively, Russia invaded Ukraine and energy costs have skyrocketed. All of these factors point towards a recession in the next few months/ next year. Year to date, the market is down -9.70%. It is understandably a hard […]
We frequently hear people comparing investing to gambling. When in fact, they are the opposite. When you gamble, your greatest chances of coming out on top is in the near term. The longer you gamble, your chances of beating the house decrease further and further. With investing, the chances of losing money in the short […]