Emerging Markets
The CFA Institute had a shindig with one of the sessions being about how much emerging market exposure to have and Seeking Alpha posted a recap of the session. The basic take was that most investors are not only under-invested but also under-benchmarke...
Pink Sheets Dot Com
Last night after reading this post about farmland prices in various countries I went to pinksheets.com to see if I could find any Romanian farming companies (Romania was one of the countries mentioned). While I am unlikely to buy a Romanian farming sto...
The Big Picture for the Week of April 24, 2011
IndexUniverse published a lengthy article by Agustin Fleites titled Is Core Investing Dead. The article does a good job exploring important portfolio concepts and addressing some of the mental and emotional obstacles that get in the way of succeeding i...
The Big Picture for the Week of March 13, 2011
IndexUniverse posted an interview with a portfolio manager who only uses country funds to build client portfolios. On one hand it was an interesting interview but on the other hand I'm not quite sure what to make of it. First let me say that anyone can...
Frontier Markets
I meant to get to this before but a while back Dow Jones redid their country classification such that they now recognize countries as being frontier (apparently this is new for them). This is interesting and you can see below how they divide up the cou...
Gooooood Morning…Laos?
The other day the Wall Street Journal had a writeup on the new stock exchange in Laos. Laos as an investment destination? While I'm sure it will be a while before Laos Telecom lists and ADR on the NYSE the opening of an exchange is a start. To read the...
Sector Selection or Country Selection?
Yesterday we had a pre-planning conference call for the Inside ETFs Conference next month in Hollywood, Florida. The panel I'm participating in is on sector ETFs. I'm a believer in building portfolios at the sector level but not necessarily just with E...
The Consensus Says "Up!"
The crew at Bespoke Investment Group posted the following table with 2011 predictions for the S&P 500 by all (or most) of the big Wall Street firms. Looking at these numbers has some utility at the very least in a contrarian way.With a nod to Ken F...
Superbowl Follow Up
During the Q&A of the emerging markets panel I sat on at the Superbowl of Indexing an audience member asked a reasonably skeptical question about the valuations of emerging markets. He noted that PE ratios are now generally in the mid teens and he ...
The Big Picture for the Week of November 21, 2010
As a follow up to yesterday's post deconstructing a Dollar Proof portfolio from Morningstar I thought it might be interesting to explore the Dollar Proof concept going sector by sector as not every equity sector is so easy to add foreign exposure but m...
The Big Picture for the Week of November 14, 2010
By now you've probably seen at least some of the Jeremy Grantham interview on CNBC. Credit Writedowns posted the entire video and it is worth watching. Here is the written transcript as well. There are a couple of things I wanted to hone in on and expl...
The Big Picture for the Week of November 7, 2010
James Picerno explored an idea put forth by research at MSCI Barra about what role global benchmarks should play in portfolio construction by money managers and the extent to which more and more US based managers are going global. This is of interest h...
