A new addition to Tradestreaming, the Tradestreaming Cascade is a highlight reel of some of the past week’s most interesting information. Much of this comes from my Twitter feed, @newrulesinvest Continue reading “Tradestreaming Cascade for week ending May 15, 2011”
This is a transcript from an interview with Robert Wright, co-author of a new book, The WSJ Guide to the 50 Economic Indicators That Really Matter: From Big Macs to “Zombie Banks,” the Indicators Smart Investors Watch to Beat the Market. You can listen to the program below or go here. Check out our interview archives. Subscribe to receive new interviews on iTunes.
The following transcript was paid for at Speechpad.
Announcer: Live from the Internet, it’s Tradestreaming Radio with your host, Tradestreaming.com’s own, Zack Miller.
Zack: Hey, this is Zack Miller. Welcome to Tradestreaming Radio where we help investors make better decisions with tools, tips, and technology. We speak to some of the smartest and most creative people out there working in this space and hope to illuminate some of these ideas to you.
Today’s guest is a co-author of the new book, The WSJ Guide to the 50 Economic Indicators That Really Matter: From Big Macs to “Zombie Banks,” the Indicators Smart Investors Watch to Beat the Market
Robert Wright will be our guest on today’s show. He is the Nef Family Chair of Political Economy at the Augustana College in South Dakota. Wright is an accomplished author. He has two pages worth of books that he’s published on Amazon. He teaches monetary history. He teaches business. He teaches about price discrimination. What I think makes Wright and this book so valuable for people is that it combines detailed scholarship, really sort of drilling down into numbers, fact-based investing. I’m seeing how some of the leading indicators, some economic data and business data that we read about every day in the paper, how those really impact investing, testing them, going as far as seeing whether these data actually help investors and how profitable they may be as investing strategies. But he’s also a good writer. He’s a self-described cynic, along with Simon Constable, and the book has a very good readability.
Some of the things you might learn about in this podcast, so successful investing means making and keeping above market returns at each stage of the business cycle, and this book very much focuses on trying to determine where we are on the map of the business cycle by looking at certain criteria and then figuring out how to invest based upon that location. Investors must correctly forecast the business cycle before they can know which types of specific investments are likely to generate superior returns.
Wright recommends that looking at investing not as a one-off event. It’s a learning process. This is something I talk about in Tradestream all the time. It’s a lifetime commitment to understanding the economy. Forecasting is more art than science. We know this as investors, and it’s good to have rules-based investing, but we know that no rule is going to be right 100%, and our capacity to accurately predict stems from a combination of historical data and a model that correctly identifies causal agents rather than mere statistical correlations.
There are 50 indicators in this book. Some are well known, some are less well known. It’s a good book. It doesn’t cost a whole lot. It’s like $9.99, whether you buy it in mass market paperback or you buy it for the Kindle, which is where I read. It’s useful. It’s definitely important for business cycle investing. It should deserve an important place on your shelf. Continue reading “How to use economic indicators to become a better investor (transcript)”
This event was already held. Check out this event’s presentation, Building an investment advisory business from the ground up.
 |
|||||||||||||||||||
From the ground up: How to build a successful money management firm |
|||||||||||||||||||
|
In a recent webinar, I sat with Maz Jadallah, founder/CEO of AlphaClone, a software provider and investment manager enabling what I call “piggybacking strategies” of top hedge funds.
We discussed some of the objections investors have to creating strategies involving replicating hedge funds. We also provided 5 tips to perform better using cloning strategies. It was a intriguing session with some great questions from the audience — make sure you sign up to this blog to be notified of our next event.
Tadas at Abnormal Returns had me on last week for a conversation about all the crazy things I do. From my book, Tradestreaming, to the ebook I published to help financial people get books published, to my free download on how to grow a financial services business like Ken Fisher did. We talked a lot about the state of the art in investing and industry trends.
He’s really got game. You can watch the interview below. Of if you don’t see it, click here.
On Tradestreaming Radio, we’re interviewing lots of innovative entrepreneurs, investors, and researchers all trying to make investors better at what they do. Check out our archives. Subscribe on iTunes.
We welcome Robert Wright, co-author of a new book The WSJ Guide to the 50 Economic Indicators That Really Matter: From Big Macs to “Zombie Banks,” the Indicators Smart Investors Watch to Beat the Market
Wright is a university professor, prolific author
We discuss:
(Amazon)
Join us this coming Monday May 9th @ 4pm ET for a free online discussion on the “5 Myths About Cloning Hedge Funds”.
We’ve been following hedge fund replication strategies (what I call piggybacking) since the early days of this blog and back to 2009 on NewRules. It’s not only a topic I like to analyze, but I’ve moved a lot of my own investment activity to leverage the power of cloning.
Readers of Tradestreaming will know that AlphaClone, a research platform that enables investors to backtest multiple cloned portfolios of the world’s best investors, has been helping to make piggybacking practical for all types of investors.
But investors I speak with still struggle with understanding the rigor in cloning — misconceptions about the strategy still abound.
So, I’ve invited Maz Jadallah, founder and CEO of AlphaClone, to address these issues. In an upcoming webinar, we’ll discuss:
Space is limited. Click here to reserve your seat now.
We’re looking at new schools for my soon-to-be high schooler son.
As parents, we’ve made so many mistakes, learning and futzing things up as we go.
I’m not the same parent as I was 13 years ago.
Investing isn’t an activity — it’s a process.
Tradestreaming is all about learning from — and sharing — what we’ve experienced.
From my interview earlier this week with Jonathan Clements (author of The Little Book of Main Street Money and previously the personal finance columnist for the Wall Street Journal)):
A lot of what it takes to become a good investor and a good manager of your money is just time. Think about people’s learning curve — in some sense we don’t really get an opportunity to become experts in money management unless we really put our minds to it. Most of us will only buy 2 or 3 or 4 homes during the course of our lives — we never really get the chance to become experts at that. So, there’s a good chance that we’re going to mess up.
Similarly, we only get to claim Social Security once, so in terms of when to claim Social Security, there’s a good chance, we’re going to mess up royally.
And similarly when it comes to investing, yeah, we’re going to get the chance to see a lot more bull and bear markets than we would opportunities to buy homes. Nonetheless, the chance to mess up is enormous in part because people have to cope with all this noise.
I’m sending my kid to high school. Like James Altucher, I don’t know if I’ll send him to college. There is so much information readily available to investors, you can get a degree in hard knocks if your’re diligent and interested.
You just have to plug into the Tradestream.
A new addition to Tradestreaming, the Tradestreaming Cascade is a highlight reel of some of the past week’s most interesting information. Much of this comes from my Twitter feed, @newrulesinvest
Research update: Activist Investing (The Activist Investor): More research into the value extracted by activist investors — this time looking at shareholder proposals and voting.
The art of investing in today’s economy (Tradestreaming): New podcast with the former personal finance columnist for the WSJ, Jonathan Clements.
Favorite Boutique Asset Managers Launch New Funds (Morningstar): Ariel, Fairholme, Royce, FMI among the firms launching new mutual funds with interesting strategies.
May 3rd poorest performing month in pre-election years (Stock Trader’s Alamanac): A hypothetical $10k investment in the DJIA for November-April would have compounded to over $500k (1986 – present) while May-October would have resulted in a $379 loss.
Sectorology: How the financial sector stacks up against other industries (Random Roger): Interesting view on short-term, long-term investing in financial stocks.
The predictive power of the combo of Morningstar stars, expenses, investor returns, manager records and active share (Morningstar): More Morningstar research on how best to use their information for profitable investing.
Online brokerage no threat to advisors? Yeah, and I’m a meat-eating rabbit (New Rules of Investing): Redefining the role of brokerage and advice in the age of social media.
Curious to see what resources you use and find most useful for hedge fund cloning, tracking, piggybacking. Vote on the ones below or add your favorites.
