Category: Analysis

  • What the Top Advisors Know About the HNW Marketplace

    Top advisors have high-net-worth clients. Lots of them. That’s because there are about 4 ultra-high net worth Americans (net worth over $10 million) for every financial advisor. Yes, you read that right. So, it means there’s unprecedented opportunity for financial advisors and their practices – read on to see why.…

  • What the Top Advisors Know About the HNW Marketplace

    Top advisors have high-net-worth clients. Lots of them. That’s because there are about 4 ultra-high net worth Americans (net worth over $10 million) for every financial advisor. Yes, you read that right. So, it means there’s unprecedented opportunity for financial advisors and their practices – read on to see why.…

  • Competitive Pressure Explains the Absence of Left-Handed Catchers

    This post has nothing directly to do with investment markets or tax strategy. However, the insights here, about how competitive pressures explain observed phenomena in baseball, might have analogues in the areas of markets and tax planning. There are few activities more competitive, and the results of which are more…

  • Do Tariffs Cause Inflation?

    Many media sources report that Trump’s tariff policy will cause inflation. Will it? On July 15, the government announced that the CPI for June 2025 rose by 0.3% for the month. The next day, the PPI for June was reported to have been unchanged on the month. The press reported…

  • Is Rebalancing Really a Good Idea?

    Investing involves tradeoffs. Perhaps the primary tradeoff is between expected return and expected risk. Investing is difficult, at least in part, because we can never be sure, when we look into the future, if our expectations about future return or future risk are correct. Given that investing is a balancing…

  • Should Gold Be in Your Portfolio?

    Many well-respected investors and finance writers—from Warren Buffett to Burton Malkiel (author of Random Walk Down Wall Street)—do not believe that investors should own gold as part of their investment portfolios. However, many other investors and commentators argue that gold does belong in most portfolios. Who’s right? In this post,…

  • Don’t Be Fooled by the Boom: Real Estate’s Real Return Story

    In previous posts, we saw that real estate has had volatility similar to that of stocks, with correlation low enough to make it a useful portfolio diversifier. But we also want to know what kind of returns to expect from real estate if it is included in a portfolio. Historical…

  • How Much Real Estate Should I Own? Examining Real Estate Volatility

    In a previous post, we saw that real estate is by market value the largest asset class in the world. According to most interpretations of the efficient market hypothesis, this fact suggests that real estate should be a part of most portfolios that adopt an indexing approach. In this post,…

  • The World’s Largest Asset Class, and How to Think About It

    In previous blogs, we looked at bonds and stocks as asset classes. We developed an approach based on return factors and return correlations to decide which asset classes should be considered by most investors. In this post, we look at real estate. However, unlike the case with stocks and bonds,…

  • Should Country Be an Explanatory Factor in Investing?

    In previous posts, we looked at a number of explanatory “factors” which may explain the returns on stocks. But there’s one variable we didn’t discuss. For some reason, in the factor literature, the country of a stock is rarely considered to be a “factor.” But in practice, most investors do…