Investments

Waiting for the end

In the run-up to the U.S. elections, investors might have been forgiven for thinking the worst of the bear market was behind them. The S&P 500 had bounced off of its low of about 840, set on October 27, to above 1,000 by November 4, 2008 – Election Day. The choice of Illinois Senator Barack […]

By Staff |December 22, 2008

5 min read

Market busters

When markets tank – even though a correction, or even a bear market, was long overdue – investors usually have difficulty staying the course. That’s not news for fi- nancial advisors. Risk tolerance morphs into loss aversion as the enduring fact of market cycles is learned one more time. Are market cycles avoidable? There’s no […]

By Scot Blythe |December 22, 2008

8 min read

Rewarding risk

Portfolio and fund managers have short time horizons when investing. Their compensation promotes asset gathering and short-term performance. That means managers are paid for hot annual numbers, trade more frequently than is sometimes prudent, and subject clients to unnecessary costs. Managers will deny it, but they all try to “time markets,” a notoriously difficult and […]

By Ioulia Tretiakova |December 22, 2008

5 min read

Beta loaded

Despite being caught with their hands in the beta cookie jar last quarter, hedge funds had one of the best relative performances ever in Q3 – beating equity indices by a country mile. Most industry participants acknowledge that various alternative beta and even, as we have recently seen, traditional betas have found their way into […]

By Chris Holt |December 22, 2008

3 min read