Diversification Evolves?
Jason Zweig had a column up over the weekend that included the following observation;It thus takes roughly 40 large stocks today to equal the diversification benefit investors got from just 20 stocks in the early 1990s, warns Mr. Sullivan of the Financ...
Cinco de Mayo!
Yesterday I stumbled across two unrelated posts that each offered important thinking points.The first was from Niels Jensen via Credit Writedowns. Jensen had been very bullish on crude oil for many years starting in 2004 but now expects a meaningful dr...
Sunday Morning Coffee
The Barron's interview this week was with Marty Whitman who is probably most known as the manager of the Third Avenue Value Fund (TAVFX). The fund is 20 years old and since inception it has absolutely clocked the broad market. According to Morningstar ...
Narrow Leadership
Yesterday on CNBC David Faber and Gary Kaminsky did a bit about how five stocks have accounted for 27% of the S&P 500's performance this year. As I am in a Tivo-less environment I could not pause to get all five but two of them were Apple (AAPL) an...
What To Do About Increased Correlation
There has been a report floating around from State Street that included the following interesting nugget about correlation;When returns (utilizing US and non-US equity markets) are greater than one standard deviation above the mean, the correlation is ...
Connie Mack
Consuelo Mack articulated something interesting in the opening for this week's show. She talked about the school of thought that says the best active managers tend to outperform in flat and down markets and lag during markets that are up a lot. If I fo...
Volatility Budgets
Recently I was asked what I thought about a particular big cap tech stock that is popular with investors. The person appeared to be surprised by my answer in such a way that lead me to think that he had not heard this point before.The stock has pluses ...
Price Targets?
Jeff from Milan (two days in a row for him) asked a question that despite his being good naturedly heckled could make for a useful post. He asked a question that I took to be about how to set price targets and time horizons for stocks.Jeff will not lik...
Stock Picker’s Market? Really?
BusinessWeek served up a couple of nuggets from Bob Olstein. He is quoted as saying that "investors need to focus on quality of earnings and choose companies that have been able to generate free cash flow even during the financial crisis."I may be wron...
