Financial News

Why is this Topic Important to Wealth Managers? This blogticle represents a special series regarding advanced investing with ETFs. Recently there has been much discussion in the marketplace on the use of these tools and thus we present this topic for wealth managers who may consider these investment vehicles for their clients.

The Move Towards Absolute Return in Parts of the Institutional Investing World

During the period from 2007-2009 much greater attention has been paid to the use of hedge-fund-like “absolute return” strategies amongst institutional asset management portfolio managers. The phrase “absolute return” is used to differentiate the concept from the more traditional “relative return” mandates.

Human vs. Robot: Winner Take All?

Nope (at least not for a while).There is a big discussion in the investment management and financial planning world about the disruptive impact of technological advances on the industry, and in particular, the possibility of the “robo-advisor” supplanting the traditional human advisor as the primary deliverer of financial services to the end user. For the unfamiliar, robo-advisor is the preferred term of the financial media to describe a variety of digitally-delivered online services that leverage technology to attempt to automate the bulk of (if not all of) the investment advisory services process for retail investors, and in some cases parts of the fee financial planning process. These services purport to provide a low-cost technology-dependent approach to personal financial life, with the early adopters having primarily come from the millennial demographic cohort.

Why is this Topic Important to Wealth Managers? This blogticle represents part two a special series regarding advanced investing with ETFs. Recently there has been much discussion in the marketplace on the use of these tools and thus we present this topic for wealth managers who may consider these investment vehicles for their clients.

The saying goes that “the best way to gain money is to avoid losing it.” It is also said that “nothing is certain in life except death and taxes.” If there is truth to either of the above kernels of wisdom, a logical conclusion is that the most assured way to avoid losing money is to minimize, defer, and eliminate taxation to the greatest extent possible. This article begins a 3- part article series that will briefly outline some of the most common and effective means of limiting the over-taxation of the individual investor’s portfolio. The techniques described here will be most beneficially applied if diligently overseen and executed through a competent financial planner and portfolio manager.

Today’s blogticle concludes our 3 part series on tax efficient investment opportunities. Please see the two previous days coverage for the full story.

This article represents part 2 of 3 in this series. Please see yesterday’s post as well as tomorrow’s for the full article.

If you are a professional in the investment management or economics fields, your entire system of decision making and the basis of everything you do in your workday may be wrong. While the following discussion may seem purely academic, it could actually have far-reaching practical implications for your personal and professional livelihood.

The two years preceding 2010 have resulted in a great deal of criticism of the ideas of rational economic actors and the “Efficient Markets Hypothesis” (EMH), the latter of which attempts to describe the pricing of securities markets. While an in-depth discussion of EMH and its validity is beyond the scope of this article, it is worthwhile to consider the antagonistic viewpoint on this subject, which states that markets are largely inefficient, and by extension means that it is possible for an investment portfolio manager to consistently beat the markets in terms of portfolio risk/return performance based on skill (which is contrary to EMH). But rather than make an absolute judgment on whether markets are 100% efficient or 100% inefficient, we can alternatively make the assumption that markets are sometimes “efficient” and are other times “inefficient.” If we are to take this latter stance, then how should portfolio managers best act for their clients?