In Search of Higher Returns

As investors seek higher investment returns to help achieve their financial goals, where should they look? Before searching for someone or a particular strategy or combination of strategies to meet your outperformance expectations, maybe the first question to ask is, can you outperform the stock market over time? Unfortunately, conventional wisdom suggests that outperforming the…

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More Than One Way to Skin a Cat

When it comes to investing, there are numerous ideas on the table, but the most successful will have the same underlying theme. Ultimately, successful investors want to find a way to buy stocks that are worth more than the initial purchase price when sold. The investment holding period, which can range from days to years,…

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The Role of Bonds in Your Portfolio

Are you relying too heavily on bonds in your portfolio? The role of bonds in a portfolio has typically been to dampen volatility within your investment holdings but overusing them can be detrimental to meeting your long-term financial goals. For investors, all you need to achieve your financial goals is the right combination of stocks,…

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Timing the Stock Market

Perfectly timing the stock market is a losing proposition and will likely result in failure. However, there are investors who feel that market timing is helpful and therefore hedge their bets based on their forecasting models. If those bets are correct, then there is a lot of money that can be made. But on the…

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Are You Obsessed with the Sharpe Ratio?

The Sharpe Ratio is essentially a measure of risk adjusted return which measures investment return per unit of risk. Presumably, the higher the Sharpe Ratio the better. Many quantitative investment firms require potential portfolio managers (PMs) to be able to demonstrate their ability to build investment portfolios with Sharpe Ratios exceeding a certain value. Again,…

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Who Should You Trust? Trust The Data

As investors read the daily financial news and listen to their favorite investment gurus on television or the internet, who should they trust? All can agree that the stock market has risen over time at an average rate of about 10% per year and that likely will continue over the long term. Unfortunately, many investors…

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Is it Really Your Financial Adviser?

If you have a financial adviser, then you probably have a way of determining if your adviser is a good fit or not. Usually, investment track-record and trust are two of the biggest factors when it comes to determining whether or not you are happy with your adviser. Being a financial adviser is essentially a…

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Technically, We Are in a Recession. Now What?

With back-to-back quarterly declines in GDP, we are currently in a recession based on the technical definition. GDP growth for the first two quarters of 2022 was -1.6% (Q1) and -0.9% (Q2). Going beyond the technical definition of a recession, it is debatable as to whether we are in a recession primarily because of the…

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Does PE Ratio Matter?

There are two kinds of PE ratios that are typically calculated, absolute PE ratios and relative PE ratios. Absolute PE ratios are essentially a stock’s current price divided by its most recent 12 months of earnings. Relative PE ratios tend to compare a stock’s absolute PE ratio to an industry average or to a stock’s…

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Making Your Stock Market Purchase Decision

As an investor in the stock market, one of the decisions you will have to make is when to buy stocks and the timing of those stock purchases. During the decision-making process you will hear discussions about the current economic environment, including factors such as inflation, deflation, GDP (Gross Domestic Product), unemployment, trade wars, interest…

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