The world of withholding tax recovery on foreign dividends and interest is woven with intricacies, challenges, and a general lack of transparency. This is mainly due to its complexities and the cumbersome process involved in [...]
Quantitative factor portfolios generally use historical company fundamental data in portfolio construction. The key assumption behind this approach is that past fundamentals proxy for elements of risk and/or systematic mispricing. However, what if we could [...]
Tesla (TSLA) breached the $100 billion market capitalization in January 2020 and became the most valuable car manufacturer globally. However, valuing the company is challenging given the growth profile, complexity of the business, and erratic [...]
Building on the concepts presented in my Dividends Are Different article, here we present data and observations highlighting the relationship between inflation and 1) company fundamentals, 2) dividends, and 3) stock market movements.It may be [...]
Boring versus Cheap Winners
Betting on Boring Winners
Multiple events last year reminded us that “price” is a nebulous concept. The most well-publicized price disagreement came in September of 2019 when the public market balked at the price the private market (ok, mainly [...]
Surveys often reveal investor behavior that is challenging to understand. For example, Preqin’s Alternative Investor Outlook for H2 2019 highlighted the following: 65% of institutional investors believe that real estate is overvalued and a correction [...]
INTRODUCTION Factor investing is hard and some factors make it harder than others. A value strategy results in a portfolio of stocks that exhibit temporary or structural issues and are usually rated “Sell” by brokers, [...]
INTRODUCTION Funds flows are frequently analyzed by investors to gauge the demand for investment strategies, but it represents a challenging exercise. Key issues are data availability as few market participants disclose their holdings as well [...]
There has been abundant discussion regarding the utility of dividends.Here are a few examples: dividends, dividends, and more dividends…and Jon See'ds piece on buybacks, if you'd like to go down that rabbit hole. Many [...]
The Truth About the Panic of 2008 (And the Botched Regulatory Response) Ask 100 Americans what caused the 2008 financial crisis, and 99 will supply some version of the “Standard Narrative.” That is, they will [...]
It's not a perfect world out there and often times alternative funds are mischaracterized, misused, and not put through a rigorous enough portfolio construction process. It's my hope that I can forewarn you of the [...]
I recently experienced one of those fortunate confluence of events that helped me better grasp the relationship between forecasting (which I feel is futile) and my contrarian biases (which are strong). I better realize now [...]
In the great book and series Game of Thrones, the inhabitants of the Iron Islands have a saying "What is Dead May Never Die" which is to be replied with "But rises again harder and [...]
Employee equity & stock options are a major part of the modern compensation plan. That's certainly the case for my financial planning clients. Unfortunately, a search for the best approach to managing your equity opens [...]
The underperformance of value stocks over the past 10 years has received much attention from the financial media and led at least some investors to conclude that value investing is dead. From 2009 through March [...]
The tax benefits of the new Opportunity Zone program are potentially phenomenal. However, when you dig into the details of the program you quickly realize that many of the investment options are typically higher-risk and [...]
Executive Summary • Tax loss harvesting is widely promoted, but we think the benefits are generally misunderstood and often overstated.a recent paper highlighted by Wes on twitter comes to a similar conclusion. Here is a [...]
Financial planning and specifically portfolio "safe" withdrawal rates are often viewed and analyzed from the perspective of rigid rules that can't be broken - i.e., you will take an inflation adjusted 4% of starting portfolio [...]
