Friday, August 5, 2011

Short Takes: Study Says Pension Funds Beat the Market, Bailouts Using Bond Fund Assets, and more

Larry MacDonald found an academic study showing that pension funds outperform indexes. I asked Larry Swedroe about this study and his first reaction was that the results can be explained by momentum effects.

Jason Zweig reports that some bond fund assets are used to bail out borrowers.

Money Smarts explains that portfolio rebalancing is for controlling volatility rather than maximizing returns.

Canadian Couch Potato defended index investing against some criticism, and The Blunt Bean Counter took a 1000-foot view of the whole debate.

Retire Happy Blog tries to tackle the difficult issue of what returns you can expect from the stock market when planning for retirement.

Big Cajun Man says that his staycation isn’t as cheap as he’d like.

Million Dollar Journey surveys the top U.S. dollar credit cards in Canada.

How to Invest Online takes a look at various ways of expressing the damage that costs can do to your portfolio.

4 comments:

  1. The Blunt Bean CounterAugust 5, 2011 at 8:06 AM

    Michael, thx for link. Interesting discussion including your take this week on the passive investing issue. Unfortuantely, passive or not, we may all be taking pepto bismol after yesterday.

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  2. Thanks for the mention. I too was surprised with that study that Larry M. found.

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  3. Mike, Thanks for mention. The study said US pension funds' alpha was due to momentuum factors; Canadian pension funds avoided the Nortel effect in early 2000s.

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