The Proper Context of Low Beta ETFs
IndexUniverse had a post that explored some of the nuances of the PowerShares Low Volatility ETF (SPLV) and the PowerShares High Beta ETF (SPHB). The article was a little muddled in that it seemed to start out by making the argument for why now might ...
Seeing What We Want To See
On the Seeking Alpha version of my post the other day about how risky stocks are or are not a reader left a comment whereby he thought my post validated his preferred investment style. This was very interesting.For purposes of this short post it does n...
Hugh Hendry in Barron’s
The Barron's interview was with Hugh Hendry from Eclectica and as it always is with Hugh, it was very interesting even if part of it may have been a conversation I could not hear (paraphrase of one of my favorite quotes from the show Deadwood).A big fo...
Reader Question
The other day I wrote about changes to the portfolio we've made over the last few months that had the goal of making the portfolio less defensive (selling an inverse index fund and buying two stocks and a narrow ETF). The following questions came into ...
How and When to Sell
A few comments came in over the weekend asking for my take about when to sell a stock. This is a multi dimensional topic with a lot of variables for each dimension but I will try to cover a lot of ground. Keep in mind this is what we do for client acco...
Managing Sector Volatility
One part of how I manage the portfolio is monitoring and changing the volatility profile of each sector based on what I think is going on now and what I think comes next based on what is going on now. I mention this in passing far more than I actually ...
More On "Just Don’t Lose It"
I wanted to delve a little further into the Just Don't Lose It cover story from this week's Barron's. The article included some sort of model portfolio that US Trust is apparently recommending to its clients. There were a couple of different things in ...
Sunday Morning Coffee
The Barron's cover story was titled Just Don't Lose It and it tried to explore the extent to which investor psychology has shifted to being more skeptical or distrusting and the article also tried to offer some solutions. Candidly the article was a lit...
The Big Picture for the Week of January 15, 2012
In the middle of the day on Friday we executed a trade for most of our "large" clients. We bought the Global X Fertilizer & Potash ETF (SOIL). Long time blog readers may recall my long term belief that the growth rate of the world population combin...
What Type of Buyer Are You?
Yesterday a reader left a question about where I was on investing in the banks. My answer was probably not a surprise in that I said I still believe the fundamentals stink, assuming he was talking about the US banks, because of a lousy real estate mark...
Re-Equitization
Over the last couple of weeks I've disclosed a couple of trades we've placed for our large accounts that started the process of moving toward being fully invested. Yesterday we executed trades for most of our small and mid sized accounts with the same ...
The Big Picture for the Week of January 8, 2012
Yesterday we executed a trade for most "large" accounts buying KLA-Tencor (KLAC). The pick is more of a top down decision (more on that in a moment). The company makes equipment used in manufacturing many types of semiconductor; data storage, LED, sola...
