Below you'll find a list of all posts from July, 2017
How good were the good old days? Was the post-World War II economic boom in the United States and other developed countries a truly special period, one that we cannot expect to repeat, even over centuries-long time frames? Where did those exceptional growth rates come from, and what — if anything — can we do to bring them back? In …
Who is better at value investing: robots or people? How have robots — the quantitatively-driven passive funds that hold, for example, low price-to-book stocks — fared against actively managed value mutual funds? A provocative paper forthcoming in the Financial Analysts Journal, “Facts About Formulaic Value Investing,” by U-Wen Kok, Jason Ribando, and Richard Sloan, argues that robots are poor value …
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and Jack Bogle, founder of Vanguard, were among the distinguished speakers at the 2017 Morningstar Investment Conference in Chicago. Both men’s accomplishments have disrupted existing practices in ways that have almost uncountable benefits for mankind. As I’ll demonstrate, each of them has been responsible for two major disruptions. Wales set as his objective the dissemination …
Is the world going to hell in a handbasket? Are most people getting poorer while the rich get richer? Have we destroyed the planet? In a sparkling — and delightfully short — new contribution to the econo-optimist genre, Johan Norberg, author of Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, emphatically answers “no.” Consider the following:In 1981, “extreme” poverty …