Retirement may be the new 40, some advertisers suggest: Retirees are only as old as they feel, and the world is their oyster. That may well be true, but their savings accounts don’t have the same elasticity as they did at 40. There are wrinkles — some deeply etched ones, in fact. After all, at […]
As the global economy completes is latest weak lap around the track, worries abound on different sides of the stands—on one, concerns focus on deflation; while the other side frets about inflation. But the real worry may be that policymakers are treating a solvency problem like a liquidity problem. Liquidity means central banks are injecting […]
Market-cap weighting is the most efficient and cheapest way to tap an economy’s growth has long been under attack. First, it was in the seminar rooms of business schools, where persistent anomalies — the value, small-cap and momentum effects — defied the so-called market portfolio. Then it hit opposition on the ground, at least for […]
In half a century, nothing much has changed in asset allocation, except for one thing: risk. Modern asset allocation began with the mean-variance model pioneered by Nobel laureate Harry Markowitz in the 1950s, which illustrates how diversification across relatively uncorrelated assets smoothes returns. Given a set of assets with known co-variances, one can construct an […]
This Advisor.ca Special Report is sponsored by: Left to their own wits, employees often exercise the same acuity in investing as they do in boosting their favourite hockey team. The stakes are chump change in a hockey pool. With a retirement fund, however, they are the stakes of a lifetime. With a defined benefit pension […]
When stock markets seized up in early May 2010 — the Dow Jones Industrial Average did a 15-minute, 1,000 point bungee jump — many were quick to point the finger at other fingers: the ones attached to ham-handed traders mistyping their sell orders. Maybe. Or maybe it was something else. Welcome to the new world […]
As the yen skyrockets to 15-year highs, despite the confirmation of an almost zero-rate interest policy by the Bank of Japan, it’s fairly clear that currency management isn’t a predictable business for investors with international assets. Currency management was the topic of the most recent Canadian Investment Review debate. Is active hedging the answer? Thanos […]
Insurance advisors may well have a template to cover off obvious insurable risks for their clients. Often those risks involve some projection of future financial security. How much should future financial security be covered though? There is a product for every need — almost. In terms of academic financial theory, insurance markets are often not […]
With Ontario toying with the notion of selling a 20% stake in government enterprises such as the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation and Hydro One, infrastructure investing is moving from the hidden fields of alpha to mainstream beta: an asset class everyone can invest in. But the terms and […]
In half a century, nothing much has changed in asset allocation, except for one thing: risk. Modern asset allocation began with the mean-variance model pioneered by Nobel laureate Harry Markowitz in the 1950s, which illustrates how diversification across relatively uncorrelated assets smoothes returns. Given a set of assets with known co-variances, one can construct an […]