Blog Posts

When it comes to investing, few names carry as much weight as Warren Buffett, as one of the world’s most successful investors. Over the decades, Buffett has developed an investment approach that has made him one of the world’s most successful people by conventional measures. What especially stirs up public interest in Buffett is his […]

Exchange rates have always been one of the noisiest variables in global finance.  If you trade interest rates, the rate is either there by date X or it’s not. If you trade bonds, they move based on duration and sometimes credit risk, but the payout is usually known ahead of time. But exchange rates are […]

Why have small-cap stocks historically outperformed large caps? And does this still hold true today? That’s the basis of the size factor, nested in the broader area of finance known as factor investing. Factor investing fundamentally is about isolating specific characteristics of assets – e.g., size, value, quality, low volatility – to harvest either: outperformance […]

The pursuit of value – finding assets priced below their intrinsic worth – has been a cornerstone of investing for centuries. Despite the variety of strategies today, value is still the bedrock of many today – i.e., how can you get the most out of what you pay? What yield do you need to justify […]

The UBS Global Investment Returns Yearbook covers a 125-year dataset of financial returns over 35 markets and multiple asset classes. It’s useful to investors and long-term allocators because it provides insights into what kind of returns can be expected and how to go about making portfolios more resilient.  For traders and shorter-term allocators, this is […]

In this article, we have an era-by-era compendium of stock-market-relevant facts and statistics. We go from ancient antecedents and early joint-stock experiments, through the Dutch birth of the modern exchange, to today’s high-speed, ETF-soaked, options-heavy markets.    Ancient and Medieval Antecedents (to 1500) In classical Athens (5th-4th c. BCE), private bankers (trapezitai) took deposits, made […]

Limiting drawdowns and tail risks is one of the key goals – or at least considerations – of a portfolio. How do we reduce drawdowns without paying for insurance in the form of options (which tends to be expensive and drags down long-term returns)? That’s what we’ll cover in this article.   Key Takeaways – […]

Asset correlation is the degree to which different assets move together for the chief purposes of diversification value. Bitcoin, since its introduction in 2009, has evolved from a speculative asset among a niche audience to an emerging macro asset. For many individual traders, they’re more interested in the volatility and price movement. For institutions, they’re […]

The safe withdrawal rate (SWR) is the percentage of a retirement portfolio that can be withdrawn each year without significantly increasing the risk of running out of money over your lifetime.  It’s a guideline to balance spending needs with asset preservation. We look at the common wisdom, then run our own simulations at the end. […]

In this article, we take a structured and more numbers-driven survey of the bond market: its early history, scale/size, strategies or uses, and key statistical trends. Key sources for this article include FRED (Federal Reserve research), SIFMA, BIS, Pew Research Center, Trading Economics, icmagroup.org, and OECD.   Key Takeaways – Bond Market Statistics Bonds evolved […]