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Become an indomitable investor — with Steven Sears

future of financial services

To build and protect wealth, Investors don’t need another get-rich-quick scheme.

Instead, look at history’s best investors to understand the basics of investing, the players in the market and their different priorities, what works and what doesn’t, and how to manage volatility.by steven sears

Steven Sears, editor and columnist at Barron’s, has written just such a book. His writing has a lifetime of experience and advice witnessing what works for the best investors…and what doesn’t.

He joins us on Tradestreaming Radio to discuss his new book, The Indomitable Investor.

Listen to the FULL episode

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The biggest problem with investment strategies

We all know how poorly individual investors do in the markets. Just look at any Dalbar study and you’ll see just how most investors don’t come close to achieving market returns.

One reason (but not the real one) why investors perform so poorly

Market structures are part of the problem. For years, it wasn’t Wall Street with its capital source, individual investors. It was Wall Street versus individual investors.

Selling is Wall Street’s essence just as surely as buying is Main Street’s. Wall Street almost never tells you to sell   (The Indomitable Investor by Steve Sears)

It’s almost as if brokers and their clients were pitted against one another — brokers sold when their clients bought.

The real reason investors struggle

But, that’s not the main reason investors stink up the joint.

Continue reading “The biggest problem with investment strategies”

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List of winners of top fintech conference, Finovate

Finovate has really become the go-to tech conference for fintech startups to launch themselves and new products. There really isn’t another conference dedicated to financial startups that competes with Finovate.

The show has grown from 250 attendees to over 1200 this year. Many of today’s leading Finance 2.0 startups have presented at Finovate at some time or another. I haven’t seen a connection (yet) between presenters at the show and future success (growth, M&A, etc.) but it’s still early for this industry.

Thanks to Famzoo (who presented last year) for putting together Finovate’s winners throughout the years.

Check it out below.

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Creating valuable mashups of investment research – with James Berman

Professor James Berman has taken a new investing research platform (Trefis) and made it even more valuable.

His new investment advisory newsletter, the Berman Value Folio, integrates interactive modeling tools to create what I think is one of the first mashups of next generation investment research.

James is our guest this week on Tradestreaming Radio to talk about the investment research process, the next generation of research tools (including Trefis), and how he’s created his investment product.

Listen to the FULL episode


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Will the future of wealth management really be “virtual”?

I’ve been chatting with a few friends over the past couple of days about which model will prevail for wealth management in years to come.

2 sides to the argument

Essentially, there are 2 sides to the argument:

  1. virtualists: The virutalists are banking on a future where investment advisors will prospect, deliver advice, and service clients over virtual channels (Internet, phone, chat, video conference). This is a boundary-less marketing environment and doesn’t put a premium on marketing to a local clientele.  That’s a world where there’s no tennis, no kids’ bar mitzvas, and certainly, no shoulder-crying on your advisor when markets go bad.
  2. ol’ skoolers: This camp doesn’t envision a world where the delivery of financial services changes very much from what it’s been traditionally. Advisors have adopted email and websites and yes, are beginning to use social networks but ultimately, it’s a face-to-face business. You may buy diapers online but you’ll never really buy financial services online.

It might be easy to dismiss the ol’ skoolers as just that — financial dinosaurs who just can’t face the digital future of the business. We’ve got plenty of analysis like this from kasina pointing to the future and it appears to be digital: Continue reading “Will the future of wealth management really be “virtual”?”

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Using Google to forecast a stock’s reaction to earnings reports – with Darren Roulstone

Smart investors are looking at various data sets to help give them an edge with their investing. Some of this information is financial in nature — much of it isn’t.

Professor Darren Roulstone has studied how investors are using Google to search out financial information and what search volume may say about future stock prices.

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We are all Greece

I have this recurring nightmare.

Actually, I’ve got a lot of frequent bad dreams but this one’s particularly chilling. Things were O.K. at work.  I was growing my responsibilities, my authority. I was getting promoted quickly. I was making money. So, like a financial optimist, I bet on the future and started borrowing.

It started small and harmless — I took a large mortgage on a house — but then, I started borrowing more money to finance a rich lifestyle.

Soon, it was like ballooning like Bono’s ego.  I had to borrow just to pay off my old loans.

It took so much financial engineering, I didn’t even have time to work  – I was so busy.

But then, out of the blue, people didn’t want to keep lending to me.

I was coming up short, compounded by the fact my work slacked and earnings were dropping as a result.

Crap, I was stuck.

I had been Greece-d.

Continue reading “We are all Greece”

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How Michelle Obama added $5B in market cap to apparel stocks – with David Yermack

David Yermack, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, studied the first lady’s impact on apparel stocks for companies associated with outfits she wore.

The results are impressive: she added over $5B in equity value to those firms in aggregate and stocks typically went up almost 2% in the week following her appearance.

What does this have to say about celebrity endorsement of stocks and companies? I ask David about this and more on this week’s episode of Tradestreaming Radio.

Continue reading “How Michelle Obama added $5B in market cap to apparel stocks – with David Yermack”

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What are the best market indicators?

I’ve had a couple of readers write in recently asking what I think the best market indicators are.

It’s a hard question — I don’t think of them in terms of best or worst. More, there are useful indicators at different junctions in the market and really, they’re all part of an investor toolbox.

But, I wanted to ask you: what do you think are the best market indicators? What do you use to help forecast which way the market is headed?

To get the conversation started, I’ve included a list of market indicators — feel free to vote on what you like, dislike, or better, add your own.

[listly id=”pR” theme=”light” layout=”full” numbered=”yes” image=”yes” items=”all”]

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Why a stock’s ticker matters – with Vallapuzha Sandhya

future of financial services

How do investors discover what to buy? How do we find investment opportunities?

In Does Investor Attention Affect Stock Prices?, Researchers found that small cap stocks with ticker symbols similar to larger cap stocks went up in sympathy with their larger cap brothers. In fact, these attention portfolios saw 1-3% abnormal returns.

Pretty interesting, so I invited one of the authors of the study, Vallapuzha Sandhya onto Tradestreaming radio to discuss her findings with us.

Continue reading “Why a stock’s ticker matters – with Vallapuzha Sandhya”