The Trouble with Forecasting Home Prices
Introduction Mortgage rates have doubled and tripled in some countries since 2021. So, why aren’t residential real estate markets more distressed? For example, the average home price-to-income ratio in the…
Climate Change, Risk Management, and the Freedom to Invest Responsibly
Risk management is so simple a concept and so central to financial analysis that it feels superfluous to even mention it. Yet when it comes to climate change and sustainability,…
Crypto’s Unanswered Question: At What Price?
Franklin J. Parker, CFA, is the author of Goals-Based Portfolio Theory, published by Wiley. Last summer, I was having lunch on the shores of Lake Maggiore in Italy with a few other…
Crypto Rising? Beyond High Beta Equity and FTX
Introduction Traditional finance had two dominant perspectives on cryptoassets as 2022 drew to a close. Some saw bitcoin and the like as merely stand-ins for high beta equity market exposure.…
Quit to Win? Six Reasons Why Winners Quit
Binod Shankar, CFA, is the author of Let’s Get Real: 42 Tips for the Stuck Manager. Sometimes quitting is the right thing to do, whether it is leaving a city,…
The First US Real Estate Bubble and Three Lessons from the Mount Tambora Eruption
Mark J. Higgins, CFA, CFP, is the author, with Elliot Chambers, of “The Panic of 1819, Silicon Valley Bank and the Dangers of Bank Runs,” from the Summer 2023 issue…
Debunking the Myth of Perfect Competition
“Every individual . . . intends only his own gain; and he is in this . . . led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no…
Why Equity Factors? A 4×4 Goal-Based Perspective
Our 4×4 Asset Allocation philosophy approaches every asset or strategy based on how it contributes to — or detracts from — four goals: Growth, Income, Preservation, and Liquidity. In particular,…
Does Bond Market Data Yield Equity Alpha?
Can stock investors benefit from corporate bond market data? Yes. In fact, equity portfolios constructed using bond momentum signals may outperform their traditional equity price momentum counterparts. But as our…
The Fitch Downgrade: The Principal–Agent Problem in Modern Finance
“Complexity is like energy. It cannot be created or destroyed, only moved somewhere else. When a product or service becomes simpler for users, engineers and designers have to work harder.…
