Knowing what to invest in is only half the problem.
How your assets are structured, protected, and planned for can be just as crucial to long term investing as choosing the right stock.
Today’s guest on Tradestreaming Radio is Rocco Beatrice Jr., director at EstateStreet Partners, and author of a surprisingly enjoyable ebook, Being Sued? The Insider Secrets of Asset Protection.
Continue reading “Protect your assets — with Rocco Beatrice Jr.”
Where do you go for new, fresh investment ideas? Where do you go once you have an idea to vet it out, dig deep down into the research to validate your investment?
More and more investors are choosing to use YCHARTS. While the “chart” in the title might be misleading, the site’s research capabilities aren’t. This isn’t a place investors hear random ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ recommendations.
YCHARTS is a full blown investment site that helps beginning and advanced investors alike to make better — more informed — investment decisions.
And that folks, is what Tradestreaming is all about. Join me for a conversation with YCHARTS’ co-founder/CEO and financial content veteran Shawn Carpenter to talk about his firm’s value for investors and where he plans on taking his offering in the future.
Shawn’s also been generous enough to offer a free PRO subscription ($400) to a Tradestreaming listener. Please ‘Like’, ‘Retweet’, or ‘post to LinkedIn’ this interview and I’ll choose one person at random to receive a free 1-year subscription to YCHARTS Pro ($400). Continue reading “Building a better investment site – with YCHARTS’ Shawn Carpenter”
As an investment advisor, Lee Hull’s clients can’t afford to have down years.
They’re retirees looking for steady income — no matter what Mr. Market has to say about it. Where traditional advisors are willing to ride the market’s ups-and-downs, Hull uses a different approach.
His returns have trounced the markets while he puts less of his clients’ capital at risk. Over the past 10 years where the markets have literally gone nowhere, Hull’s investment firm has averaged over 8% per year (net of inflation!).
That’s pretty darn good but when you see that he was “only down” 9% in his largest losing year during the same time period, that should make you sit up and listen (if you’re not already).
On today’s episode of Tradestreaming Radio., Hull shares much of his research and methodology with us. He’s the author of Less Risk, More Return: A Proven Blueprint for Retirement Plan Investing.
Look below to access Hull’s 10 Tips to Improve Investing Returns and Lower Risk.
Continue reading “Investing with more return and less risk – with Lee Hull”
Pat Huddleston is an increasingly busy guy.
The former SEC enforcer is author of the new book, The Vigilant Investor: A Former SEC Enforcer Reveals How to Fraud-Proof Your Investments.
In this episode of Tradestreaming Radio, we discuss why Pat refers to our era as the ‘Age of Fraud’. Please join us to learn how to identify and avoid investment scams.
Continue reading “Avoiding investing scams in the Age of Fraud – with Pat Huddleston”
From Liv-Ex the wine exchange:
Check out my recent interview with Lot18’s Dini Rao about investing in wine. Prices can be pretty volatile and 2011 has been a disappointment (time for value investors to step in?).
The Liv-ex Fine Wine 100 Index – the fine wine industry’s leading benchmark – dropped 4.53 per cent to 308.03, bringing its year-to-date performance to -8.40 per cent and its year-on-year performance to -2.41 per cent.
Source: Liv-Ex Fine Wine 100 Falls 4.5% in October (Liv-ex Blog)
Andrew Hallam is an awesome teacher.
He’s also a self-made millionaire, having built his nest-egg off of basic, core tenets of sound finance AND a teacher’s salary.
In this episode of Tradestreaming Radio, the author of Millionaire Teacher: 9 Rules of Wealth You Should Have Learned in School shares with us:
Joe Light at the WSJ did a good job over the weekend analyzing portfolios of activist investors and whether they are good candidates for piggyback investing (ie, cloning, replication).
The idea would be to invest in a portfolio of securities held by a particular activist investor by following their 13-F, 13-D public filings.
I’m quoted in the article, as are the usual suspects on the subject (AlphaClone, Todd Sullivan).
The article brings some interesting research to light:
One 2008 study by Duke University professor Alon Brav and other researchers found that an investor who constructed an equally weighted portfolio that bought activist targets a month after the initial filing, and held it for three months afterward, beat the market by more than one percentage point a month, on average, after adjusting for risk and other factors. But Prof. Brav notes that the outperformance disappears if all of the conditions aren’t met.
Research in 2007 by Harvard University professor Robin Greenwood and then-student Michael Schor found that companies that become the target of an activist are more than twice as likely to be acquired within a year than companies that aren’t targeted. The targets that were ultimately taken over had risk-adjusted returns 15% and 20% better than the overall market—but companies that missed the boat didn’t have any outperformance.
In spite of the research, the article concludes that replicating the portfolios of activist investors can pay off but it’s hard citing the volatility around changes in positions and the holding period.
Other hedge fund strategies (like most popular positions among multiple hedgies, best ideas, newest holdings) replicate much better.
Investing with Carl Icahn (WSJ)
October 22, 2011
How does a beginner learn about investing in wine?
Well, I went to the source (literally). Dini Rao is currently the VP of Products for exclusive wine site, Lot18 and former Christie’s wine specialist and Amazon’s senior wine buyer.
Dini takes us through the process that professionals go to invest in their choicest finds. From traveling to France to hiring a specialist to looking for value beyond the traditional geographies and labels, this episode was a quick overview of investing in wine.
Check below — we’ve got free invites for Tradestreaming readers.
I devoted an entire chapter in Tradestream to an investing strategy that mimicked insider trading. You can check out my insider trading dashboard.
Data’s been really good but the methodology is being question by new research. While previous research (specifically, that done by Seyhun in his book Investing Intelligence from Insider Trading) focused on buckets of insiders (C-level execs, VP’s, external board members, etc), new findings show that investors can get even more granular.
Like tracking individual insiders granular.
In Decoding Insider Information, Cohen et. al. finds that by identifying profitable, opportunistic (individual) insiders, investors can create a portfolio that yields value-weighted abnormal returns of 82 basis points per month.
Instead of grouping insiders together, this study filters out regular, noisy insider trading, of no value to investors trying to find someone trading on better information. By looking at insiders who trade opportunistically (every once-in-a-while), piggybacking strategies can mimic just those trades that are imbued with meaningful information (assume the insider knows something.)
—> Read Decoding Insider Information (American Journal of Finance)
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Every week, I send out an email (free) to my subscribers summarizing the must-see events of the past week. It’s everything about the intersection of technology, social media and investing.
Sign up in the sidebar, at the end of this post, or by going here.
You’ll get your 1st issue on Sunday.
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A better solution to socially responsible investing (Larry Swedroe)
A recent study shows that there is a price to pay for socially responsible investing: namely, raising the cost of capital for sin stocks. That said, Swedroe recommends avoiding SRI and donating the difference in returns to an investor’s favorite charity.
New jobs package should open up crowdfunding (Amy Cortese/NYT)
A friend of Tradestreaming, Amy Cortese penned a New York Times editorial describing some of the changes tabled in the Obama administration’s new jobs package. This one — with rare bipartisan support — may change the way small businesses raise capital and how investors can tap these new sources of returns.
Continue reading “Tradestreaming Cascade: The news you need to know (week of October 2, 2011)”
