Despite all the media coverage, glitz and glam of hedge funds, they have not done well for their investors. They have high - some say excessively high - fees; their short- and long-term performance has been poor.
If you have read me for any length of time, you know I am less than enthralled with much of what passes for financial news.
One thing I detest most about the financial press is the lack of accountability. All sorts of nonsense is said without penalty.
Narrative drives most of economics. Everything seems to be part of a story, and how that story is told often leads to critical error.
Once you research an idea, you begin to develop a perspective. Writing about anything in public, often in real time, has helped fashion my views.
Secular cycles are the long periods - as long as decades - that come to define each market era. These cycles alternate between long-term bull and bear markets.
a
The data strongly suggest that very good years in the U.S. stock market are followed by more good years.
Investing is about making probabilistic decisions with limited information about an unknowable future. The variables are well known, as are the possible outcomes.
No one knows what the top-performing asset class will be next year. Lacking this prescience, your next-best solution is to own all of the classes and rebalance regularly.