This week’s The Distillery offers refreshing insight into how much of a competitive advantage (or lack thereof) mutual funds actually have when making site visits to the companies and their executive teams they invest in. By now you should know that we at The Advocates invest specifically with funds that place an emphasis on empirical data and testing, and are implemented through a consistent and disciplined approach. So you can guess which side of the commentary we’re on!

This week’s The Distillery should provide a nice break from whatever task you may be entrenched in currently, while also offering just enough thought stimulation to energize you for the rest of your day.

Enjoy!

This week’s The Distillery offers up a good thought exercise for investors by exploring the findings from a recent academic paper which has gained popularity by calling into question the validity of stock picking. The author, Nick Maggiulli, does a good job summarizing the paper’s core thoughts and offering up his own, ultimately asking us to consider time in the overall equation of investing.

Enjoy!

This week’s The Distillery offers an interesting visual theory of market efficiency (prices fairly and accurately reflect all available information). Assuming that markets do eventually become efficient after us emotional beings react to said available information, how long does it take for markets to weigh the remainder of the available information? Days, weeks, months, years? At The Advocates we side on the credibility of 5-10 years, but click the link below to consider other alternative models.

This week’s The Distillery is a fascinating read about an often misunderstood topic: inflation and the effects of purchasing power. In fact, the author exposes a common myth that if you suspect future hyperinflation, you should sell stocks. The reverse is typically true, while your best move prior to a hyperinflationary environment is actually to take on more debt and use it to buy more stocks!

This week’s The Distillery addresses an interesting aspect of not just retiring early, but retiring early and then considering going back to work after an extended period of absence. How has your industry changed? Have your certifications expired? Is the technology landscape vastly different? While it’s easy (and enjoyable) to fantasize about retiring early, thinking through leaving retirement to return to work is not so easy (or fun) of an exercise.

This week’s The Distillery was timed perfectly with a conversation I had with a client the other day regarding delaying social security benefits and the current costs of doing so (withdrawing from your portfolio) versus the future benefits of delaying (increased SSI and survivor benefits). Kim Blanton of Squared Away, the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College’s blog, offers a fresh new perspective on delaying social security benefits by solving for the equivalent amount it would cost to purchase an annuity in the private market. We hope you enjoy!

This week’s The Distillery revisits the topic of home country bias. Or in other words, the extreme overweight of one’s home country in their investment portfolio. As Meb points out, those who have had a home country bias the last ten years have been handsomely rewarded (and pretty lucky), but if investment history tells us anything, it’s that past performance is not indicative of future results! Enjoy this well researched piece on global diversification.

This week’s The Distillery by no means offers investment advice into the frenetic, and surprisingly correlated, Trump-Twitter-Oil relationship. Instead, just enjoy the beauty that is the Trump character. As much as the general public would like to believe there’s not much going on inside that head of his, the subtle strategies he employs often come to light well after they’ve been implemented….via Twitter!

Enjoy!

This week’s The Distillery caught my attention not so much because of the title, but more so because it provides a view into the decision-making process we (planners) go through when solving through the same question with clients. Aside from an interesting planning exercise, it shows you just how much of the planning process is art and client-centric, opposed to science and strictly numbers.