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LewisBraham
Hi Hank,
Your satire came across very well. Don't worry about the user name.
Best,
Lewis
This is disappointing, given that the managers already run the emerging markets funds at Driehaus and don't seem to have much of a track record running this style of fund. It will spread their attention thin, perhaps leading to underperformance at …
@Dan, If they raise capital and seek to make profits for shareholders they are capitalist. The prevailing government ideology so long as that ideology allows them to operate in such a fashion is irrelevant.
By the way, there never has been a purely …
@David Agreed that the price gouging goes way beyond just pharma and includes pretty much everything in the U.S. healthcare experience, including seeing a doctor. But griping about doctors' salaries seems politically verboten here. I don't know why …
Anyone who has ever been to an ER knows people don't generally run to it "for every sniffle." It is a miserable experience. And Like MSF observed ER treatment is actually often more expensive than preventive medicine. If anything, the opposite is t…
@dan Are you saying that Merck, Pfizer, Gilead, Mylan, HCA and United Healthcare are not capitalist companies? "Use of costly new drugs and technologies." And why are they so costly? Have not the aforementioned companies and the healthcare sector in…
Capitalist markets work best when supply and demand for a particular good are at an equilibrium. If one exceeds the other by a significant amount, problems of exploitation will occur. If for instance demand significantly exceeds supply as is the cas…
Meanwhile, in recent years the cost per capita of Medicare spending has been falling:
nytimes.com/2014/09/04/upshot/per-capita-medicare-spending-is-actually-falling.html
The truth is we need more government healthcare, not less. Medicare should be e…
U.S net worth--household assets minus liabilities--is in excess of $88 trillion.
From CBO and ZeroHedge:
"In 2013, families in the top 10 percent of the wealth distribution held 76 percent of all family wealth, families in the 51st to the 90th…
@OldJoe, I figured you might. :-), but given the allusion above to "Stuck in the Middle with You," the song might need to be re-written: Thwarted to the left of me, Jokers to the Right....I'm sure someone with more time could think of better lyrics.…
There is also no equivalency for both parties in the inability to compromise. Mitch McConnell said early in Obama's presidency that the number one goal of the party should be to "make Obama a one-term president." Since that statement, the Republican…
@OldJoe
The problem is A) this false moral equivalency between today's candidates and B) the hagiography of the founding fathers. They were human, too. If you pricked them, they bled.
Securities lending is indeed a part of the structure of most ETFs. While Vanguard returns all of the proceeds above its internal costs for this lending to ETF shareholders, so does Schwab, although in Schwab's case it uses an outside unaffiliated ve…
Has anyone considered that the investment version of the law of large numbers might be the simplest explanation:investopedia.com/terms/l/lawoflargenumbers.asp
As a company like Walmart gets really big its harder for it to grow its top or bottom line…
@MSF, Agreed BlackRock still has a long way to go, but is somewhat ahead of the curve relative to Vanguard in acknowledging that climate change is a material financial risk. This is why of the three big indexers I say State Street is now the best ch…
@MJG. In your first post you say: " I have dusted off my copy of Rudy Giuliani's book titled "Leadership" and am presently rereading it to better recall 9/11." Then you tell Davidmoran to lighten up, that "My post was meant to be fun." Wow, Rudy Giu…
@JohnChisum It's funny how you reference Peter Lorre as he too had to escape a police state where his people were prejudged and rounded up without cause merely because of their ethnicity. His real name was Lazlo Lowenstein: https://en.wikipedia.org/…
@MJG And the Germans got the trains to run on time, too. That's what happens in police states. Moreover, Giuliani did not succeed in reducing crime as much as he claims:
politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2007/sep/01/how-much-credit-giuliani-due-f…
If I were you, I'd burn that book to get something useful out of it. Having lived in New York before, during and after 9-11, I can tell you firsthand that Rudy Giuliani's "leadership skills" lead inevitably to a police state.
@AndyJ, You're right that the insurance industry is way ahead on this issue as are asset managers owned by foreign financial conglomerates. It's no accident I think that funds run by Allianz and Deutsche Bank are voting for these resolutions. They'v…
Agreed, being a one-issue investor isn't always wise, but it is not worth looking at State Street's 2015 numbers. The important news here is the shift in voting in 2016. According to the article: "State Street supported the resolutions 51 percent of…
The title sounds like a pretty hilarious marketing slogan for robo-advisers. Bettermint: It's Not Creepy, It's the Future! Yes, it most certainly is creepy. It also seems like an excuse to maintain the rolls at financial advisory firms and continue …
The solutions are evident, but will not be politically tenable until robo-advisers replace every financial planner and index funds cause every Wall Street trader and analyst to lose their jobs. Only when the uber-capitalists are themselves Ubered ou…
For those who prefer the deep South there's this fund:
hancockhorizon.com/files/2016/2Q/Burkenroad%20Small%20Cap%20Fund%202Q16.pdf
And for those who prefer the NorthEast: morningstar.com/funds/xnas/nyvtx/quote.html
Throw in a tech fund and you proba…
@Ted,
Um, I said: "Maybe you don't know that Pittsburgh is pretty darn close to the Midwest. Drive a little bit and you're in Cleveland." Being close is not the same as being in.
East Liverpool, Ohio on the border between the two states is 40.6 mil…
@Ted, I never said a damn thing about the Eastern region. Maybe you don't know that Pittsburgh is pretty darn close to the Midwest. Drive a little bit and you're in Cleveland. And I wouldn't invest in a fund that invested exclusively in the Northeas…
My issue with Mairs & Power is the regional focus, investing primarily in the Midwest and especially in Minnesota. While the maxim invest in what you know makes sense, I wonder what happens if this region of the country experiences an economic s…
From the article: "Index funds don’t set prices; they only accept the prices that active investors have already set." Is this true? Doesn't it assume that index mutual fund and ETF investors are as robotic and passive as the funds themselves? But th…
@Davidrmoran Three factors to consider with energy stocks now:
1. Balance sheet strength--those with least debt or manageable debt with distant maturity dates will survive.
2. Marginal cost of production.
3. Geopolitical risk of well locations.
Man…
Wow, active managers must be getting really desperate to trot out this old canard that indexing is somehow communist. Bogle had to deal with these sorts of attacks when the index fund was first created:
https://books.google.com/books?id=J2B2ZSLwRZ4C…
Obama tried to get an infrastructure bill passed but Congress blocked him at every turn: https://washingtonpost.com/politics/senate-blocks-60-billion-infrastructure-plan/2011/11/03/gIQACXjajM_story.html
The one thing I find disappointing is that in all this debate about a balanced budget versus deficits, the alternative of raising taxes as opposed to austerity cuts to fiscal spending to balance the budget rarely comes up. This proves to me the deba…
Because maintaining a work life balance is hard when you spend so many hours in the office thinking of new ways to underperform your benchmark. Ask the men. They're really good at this.
@OldJoe, You're right in that I probably should have used the word "evidence," although I think we could probably use the word proof as part of a larger series of "proofs" in some sort of scientific equation or theory wherein the individual proofs i…
