Tag Archives: Closet Indexers

B. Malkiel Cannot Believe His Own Eyes

“Over the past 100 years the returns from smaller companies have exceeded those of larger companies. It is also true that stocks with low valuations (i.e. lower prices relative to earnings and book values) have generated better returns than those … Continue reading

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The Market and the Economy Mid-Year 2014: A Top-Down View

I have excerpted part of PAR’s semi-annual letter that PAR sent to clients on July 7, 2014, and I have pasted it below. No one knows where the market is going to end up in the near term, but over the … Continue reading

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What is the Effect of a Label? Smart Beta Makes Bill Sharpe “Sick”

Bill Sharpe gave us the Sharpe Ratio to help determine whether an active investment manager is “beating” the market after adjusting for the risk that the manager assumed. Sharpe is from the Efficient Market school of academia, which believes that markets are … Continue reading

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Howard Marks: The Top-Ten Qualities that Make Warren Buffett Different from Most Investors

The following are bullet points reproduced (and numbered by order of appearance) from Howard Marks’s Forward to the third edition of The Warren Buffett Way, by Robert G. Hagstrom. Marks writes a couple of paragraphs to elaborate on each bullet point, … Continue reading

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Seth Klarman is Sitting on a Mountain of Cash

“…around 50% of our assets are in cash, and that’s a very high absolute number, now around $14 billion and rising…”–Seth Klarman I recently came across this quote from Seth Klarman of the Baupost Group, which he said during a … Continue reading

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Patience, but the Willingness to Act Decisively when Opportunities Arise…

..these are the keys to investment success, not throwing capital at 500 companies merely because those companies are in somebody’s index… Continue reading

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Typical Story of an Unknown Value Investor with Little AUM

The NYSSA linked to a story in Smart Money that I had to share. It is a story of a fund manager who seeks to buy companies that are trading at a discount to their intrinsic value and that have excellent long-term prospects; in other … Continue reading

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Another Great One by James Montier

Read the whole thing: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/77f0077c-c35a-11e0-9109-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1YtylE6lL “…there is a simple, although not easy…alternative (to  benchmark-focused investing)…use a value approach across a wide range of assets. Buy when an asset is cheap, and sell when an asset gets expensive – buy low and … Continue reading

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The Investing World’s Reaction to Buffett’s Hiring of Richard “Ted” Weschler

I am surprised at the reaction among investors and the media over Buffett’s selection of Ted Weschler as one of his portfolio management successors, but I suppose I should be used to it by now. The general reaction has been: … Continue reading

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CAPE Update (Or, was Last Week’s 5.6% Market Pop Justified?)

As of July 1, 2011, the Cyclically Adjusted PE (CAPE) ratio for the S&P 500 is 23.13, which essentially means the average share of common stock in the S&P 500 companies trades for 23.13 times its annual earnings averaged over … Continue reading

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