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mutual fund expenses

Book Review: A Random Walk Down Wall Street

Right from the start this book will be an excellent read for both financial advisors as well as their clients. Dr. Malkiel provides academic insight on the reasons why passive management works and some great commentary on the use of index funds as part of someone’s overall portfolio. This was the second time I read this book and certainly not the last. It’s great reinforcement on why we invest our clients’ money the way we do and provides solid academic evidence that doing anything to the contrary is counterproductive, more expensive and simply playing a loser’s game. Some of the bigger takeaways from the book are Dr. Malkiel’s thoughts and research on the different part of the Efficient Market Hypothesis or EMH. The EMH consists of three parts – the strong form, the semi-strong form and the weak form. The EMH essential admits that markets are efficient – meaning that current […]

What a Mutual Fund Manager Won’t Tell You

Most people reading this article will have some experience with mutual funds. Whether part of your IRA, 401(k), or other savings vehicle mutual funds play a key role in helping people achieve their savings goals with access to a wide variety of companies and diversification along with professional management. By professional management we mean an individual or team of managers that run the day-to-day activities of the fund such as buying and selling of stocks and bonds as well as running financial analyses of the different companies whose stock they are looking at adding to or selling from the fund. Mutual funds and their managers vary and from the macro level you essentially have two types of managers – active and passive. Active management means that the managers of the fund actively trade securities in hopes of achieving higher than market returns or outperforming their respective benchmark, such as the […]