I’d like you to meet a fictional couple named Jim and Betty Denialist, two advisors with Reasonable Financial Services. Jim and Betty insist they are responsible advisors who help their clients make smart choices with their money and until recently, had always encouraged their clients to invest 100% of their money in mutual funds.
Let’s face it, the ongoing discussion about the relative merits of differing compensation models is one of the defining issues of our generation for our industry. The four basic options include: by salary, by the hour, by assets and by commission. There’s obviously room to mix and match and to use hybrid models, as well. Any conversation about this topic requires the requisite disclaimer of ‘it’s a free country’ and ‘you can use any compensation model you want’, of course.
Many advisors who use Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA) often struggle in explaining how DFA products differ from various other products investors might choose. One might say DFA’s approach is essentially passive but does not use conventional cap-weighted indexes like Barclay’s or Vanguard.
Although the evidence is far from conclusive or unanimous, there are many experts who believe markets are highly efficient and certainly efficient enough that it does not make sense to try to exploit whatever mispricings might still exist. For them, fundamental and technical analysis, market timing and similar methods seem nearly useless. Although it is […]
In the ongoing debate between the good and bad of competing product lines, there are often some interesting reasons given for the product recommendations. Take the use of actively managed and passively managed products, for instance. The variations on active management are nearly endless. Meanwhile, there are three distinct paradigms for passive management: the Fama/ […]
Recently, I came across a marketing pitch that described the current equity environment as being full of opportunity for good stock pickers. This is not the first time I have heard this claim, nor do I suspect it will be the last. Perhaps the people making the claim even believe it to be true. The […]
There is nothing funny about even higher mutual fund MERs, but MERs are sure to rise next summer. The Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) slated to come into effect in July 2010 in Ontario (where the lion’s share of IFIC member firms are located) will be the cause. I confess that I find the comments from […]
There’s this little intellectual quirk of logic that seems to bedevil many people who give serious thought to the relative merits of both active and passive approaches to investment management. As has been noted previously, both sides have some degree of validity and neither side has (to date, at least) managed to score a “knockout […]
While reading Thomas Homer- Dixon’s fascinating and terrifying book The Upside of Down recently, I came across an assessment of his that struck me as an insightful comment on human nature. He was commenting on the concept of denial. According to Homer-Dixon, people who succumb to denial go through three psychological phases. The first he […]
The debate between the relative merits of active and passive strategies has waged for some time now. Often, it is waged with journalists and academics taking the passive side and advisors taking the active side. Now, as pretty much everyone knows, neither side has been able to score an unchallenged victory. Given that this is […]