We Are Winning

Dividends and buybacks are poised for a comeback this year. How can analysts gauge whether they contribute to a firm’s intrinsic value? Corporations responded to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic by slashing costs and raising liquidity. In the United States, non-financial companies now hold $2.6 trillion in cash, the equivalent of over 5% of […]

Last month, I had the privilege of participating in a lively podcast discussion with two fellow women in investing, Jane Barratt, who serves as chief advocacy officer of the fintech MX, and Meredith Jones, author of Women of The Street: Why Female Money Managers Generate Higher Returns. Our conversation, hosted by YieldStreet on 21 April, […]

Thursday, 18 June 2020, is a day James H. Freis, Jr., CFA, the founder of Market Integrity Solutions, will never forget. Overnight, the mild-mannered American was thrust into the center of what would become the largest financial scandal in the history of modern Germany: Wirecard’s fall from high-flying fintech to the “Enron of Germany.” Before its collapse, […]

“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” — Attributed to Paul Batalden Dan Heath credits the inspiration for his latest book, Upstream, to a single parable ascribed to the sociologist Irving Zola. “It goes like this,” Heath, a bestselling author and senior fellow at Duke University’s CASE center, explained at the […]

What follows is a hypothetical conversation between two fictional investment professionals, US-based Bob Smith and his colleague Sandra Mueller, who works in Frankfurt. Their topic: international equity investing and diversification. Bob Smith: Hi Sandra. How are You?. Sandra Mueller: Hi Bob. Good, thank you. All is well here in Germany. The last time we spoke, […]

“David was, simply, the best at what he did. He was to endowments what Jack Bogle was to funds — none better as a person or professional.” — Steven M. Galbraith David Swensen, who passed away last week, was among the most influential investors of his generation. As chief investment officer at Yale, Swensen pioneered […]

Yvette’s inbox dings at 3:02 pm on 13 May 2038. It’s the list of trades executed by the algorithms that day. A quick review raises no red flags, which is good because she is headed into a sign-on meeting with a new client. “I need this money in the next four years, and I’m worried […]

Introduction Ted Theodore first wrote about value versus momentum stocks way back in 1984, but almost 40 years later, there still is no real consensus among investors or academics on what is driving either strategy. That’s not due to a lack of research. Thousands of papers have scrutinized equity factors across markets and asset classes, […]

The Technological Revolution in Financial Services: How Banks, Fintechs, and Customers Win Together. 2020. Edited by Michael R. King, CFA, and Richard W. Nesbitt. University of Toronto Press. The Technological Revolution in Financial Services: How Banks, Fintechs, and Customers Win Together, edited by Michael R. King, CFA, Lansdowne Chair in Finance at the University of […]

Perhaps the biggest tradeoff for equity portfolio managers is between specialization and risk reduction. The fewer stocks they research and include in their portfolios, the better their understanding of the underlying companies and the better their chances of generating excess returns by focusing on their high-conviction positions. On the flip side, the fewer stocks they […]