Investment Category

Bloomberg interviewed Steve Leuthold this morning and the legendary investor had some interesting insights into how 2009 will play out. He has turned even more bullish now given the level of fear among investors. Oh, and he also thinks the S&P 500 will close at least above 1,000 in 2009, a 40%+ return [...]

Recently finance professor Itay Goldstein[Wharton], Qi Chen [Duke University's Fuqua School of Business], and Wei Jiang [Graduate School of Business at Columbia University] autored a study on the impact of large outflows from mutual funds and how the underlying investors are impacted.
The authors believe that there are four underlying factors that will determine if mutual [...]

4 horseman’s take

In: Investment

Marketwatch has an interesting arcticle about 4 of the more contrarian investment managers around and their take on the current market environment: Jeremy Grantham (GMO), Bob Rodriguez (FPA Capital and FPA New Income), John Hussman (Hussman funds), and Steve Leuthold (Leuthold Funds)
I make it a point to always read Jeremy Granthams investment newsletters even though [...]

Final Frontier

In: Investment

I’m always looking for those inefficient and under-followed areas of the market for places and things to invest in.   In the past its been timber and commodities, but now I’ve got a new one.  It’s not that new to many people but it is definitely not something that many people are investing in…yet.
I’ve long been [...]

Timber trouble?

In: Investment

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of timber investing.  I’ve been looking for awhile on how to get timber exposure into my portfolio.  First I bought some Plum Creek Timber, but that didn’t work out so well. 
I’ve even contemplated the new Timber ETF, but that has the same problems that Plum Creek has.   It’s just [...]

Timber II

In: Investment

I meant to write a followup to my original post about timber investing but somehow never got around to it.  Well I now have a reason (but you will have to wait a little bit) for writing more. 
How do I invest in Timber?
Well this is really the hard part.  While I would argue that for most portfolios (other than [...]

That feels so good to say.  I’ve tried to be a more growth and value manager for some time but it just never fit.   Its not that I’m anti-growth or anything like that.  Its just that its not my presonality.
I started running money back around the market peak of 2000 and let me tell you it was not fun there [...]

Model Portfolio

  • Q4-08 Model Portfolio Update

    The 4th quarter, and all of 2008 for that matter, was an extremely difficult investing environment. There truely was no place to hide if you were not 100% in short term U.S. Treasurys.
    Performance:

    Aggressive -19.25% (Q4) & -32.77% (2008)
    Moderate -13.89% (Q4) & -24.86% (2008)
    Conservative -8.41% (Q4) & -15.51% (2008)

    Positives:
    For the full year only three investments [...]

  • Q3-07 Model Portfolio Update

    The third quarter of 2007 saw a return of volatility to the portfolio, but each portfolio had a positive return.  Below are the quarterly returns for each portfolio: 

    Aggressive + 2.07%
    Moderate + 2.18%
    Conservative + 2.45%

    Positives:
    For the first time in a long time, any growth domestic equity performed well.  Large, Mid, and Small Cap Growth all outperformed their [...]

  • Q2-07 Model Portfolio Update

     The second quarter of 2007 was a relatively good quarter with each model posting solid returns.

    Aggressive + 4.11%
    Moderate + 3.10%
    Conservative + 2.13%

    One asset class that showed disappointing returns as the REIT class.  The VNQ holding was down -9.35 for the quarter.   REIT’s have had quite a strong run over the past few years so this [...]

  • Q4-06 Model Portfolio Update

    The themes that have dominated over the past several years, value over growth, small/mid cap over large cap and international over domestic equities have continued into the 4th quarter of 2006.
    The 4th quarter for the models also saw an environment where no asset finished with negative performance. Leading the strong finish to 2006 was international [...]