Edward Chancellor, the financial historian now working for Jeremy Grantham’s fund management company, has done more than anyone to illuminate the imminence and consequences of the global debt crisis. In his most recent White Paper on the subject, he picks a measured path through the thickets of what soveriegn debt problems mean for economies and for investors. Among the key points I picked out from his eight page study are these:
Author: Jonathan Davis
Author, columnist and investment professional.
Mr. Market Should Sometimes Get His Way
Markets are more and more anonymous. While computers trade with each other many times a second, most transactions still occur because a human being makes a decision to trade. But there are many such people, and they need not disclose who they are.
The Fine Art of Portfolio Rebalancing
As an inveterate collector of statistical oddities, I was struck by some intriguing data on rebalancing that came out at a recent investment symposium organised by the US fund management group Vanguard. Rebalancing is one of the aspects of portfolio management that has strong theoretical justification, but is not, so I have always suspected, as easy to implement – or to justify to clients – as it should be.
Time for Procrastination Is Passing
Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning economist, was in top thundering form in his comments on the recent meeting of G20 finance ministers, which produced a noticeable change in political rhetoric by welcoming the plans by several countries to tackle their hefty budget deficits.
Q and A: Richard Oldfield
Richard Oldfield, the subject of our latest Q and A, is the founder and chief executive of Oldfield Partners, a privately owned investment management firm with $2.8 billion under management, invested wholly in equities “on a concentrated, value-focused, index-ignorant basis”. Before founding Oldfield Partners in 2005 he was for nine years chief executive of a family investment office. He is chairman of the Oxford University investment committee and of Keystone Investment Trust plc.
An End To IFA Commissions Overdue
It is nearly 40 years since Charley Ellis first categorised investment management as a “loser’s game”. Many institutional investors have taken on board that counter-intuitive message – but how many financial advisers have also absorbed the fact that a proposition that explicitly or implicitly promises clients they can pick funds that consistently beat the markets after costs is a near-certain losing proposition in the long run?
Jonathan Davis 