← Rebalancing the Sleepy Portfolio Investor Reaction to Market Volatility →

This and That # 110: Nightmare on Wall Street Edition

September 18th, 2008 ·

  1. In the course of a single week, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, AIG got taken over by the Fed and Merrill Lynch merged with Bank of America. Time magazine explains how the “this time is different” mentality landed us in this mess.
  2. Larry MacDonald notes that Lehman Brothers paid of $5.7 billion in bonuses in 2007. Nine months later it was bankrupt.
  3. Why did the Fed bail out Bear Stearns and AIG but not Lehman? The Freakonomics blog featured an insightful guest article on the financial crisis.
  4. As Jeremey Siegel wrote Stocks for the Long Run, it is hardly surprising that he thinks stocks are still a good bet. Also, a simple note to investors: don’t play games with asset allocation.
  5. The New York Times featured an interesting graphic on the incredible shrinking US financials.
  6. Larry Swedroe writes in Money magazine that bear markets may be painful but they are inevitable and a necessary evil.
  7. The Globe Investor magazine carried a fascinating feature on how professional hockey players invest their portfolios. While a very large fixed-income allocation might not be suitable for average investors like us, most of us can identify with their main goal of signing autographs “because they want to, not because they have to”.
  8. Million Dollar Journey compares online DVD rental services.
  9. Preet reminds us that someone is buying even in a brutal sell off.
  10. Dividend guy on the four important metrics he looks at in evaluating dividend stocks.

Bookmark:   del.icio.us Digg StumbleUpon

Related Posts:

Tags: Miscellaneous

8 responses so far ↓

  • 1 This and That # 110: Nightmare on Wall Street Edition // Sep 18, 2008 at 10:18 pm

    [...] Original Canadian Capitalist [...]

  • 2 MillionDollarJourney // Sep 19, 2008 at 6:56 am

    Thanks for the link CC! Hope you have a good weekend.

  • 3 WhereDoesAllMyMoneyGo.com // Sep 19, 2008 at 9:05 am

    Thanks for the link CC - have a great weekend!

  • 4 John // Sep 19, 2008 at 9:52 am

    In his article “ETFs in falling markets” found here :

    https://www.tdcanada.wallst.com/tdw/canada/markets/news/markets.exculsiveInsight.story.asp?docKey=867-GIGOLD20080917pape17-1

    Gordon Pape claims “there is no evidence” that “only a minority of actively-managed mutual funds beat their benchmark indexes”. He doesn’t use any figures for this statement claiming that by definition 100% of index funds lag their benchmark after fees. I suppose that index funds do have a small lag, I wonder if anyone has quantified how much mutual funds lag their respective index’s by?

  • 5 Al // Sep 19, 2008 at 9:56 am

    Has anyone else had difficulty logging onto their TD Waterhouse discount brokerage accounts today?

  • 6 John // Sep 19, 2008 at 10:01 am

    Sorry, that link required a login, here is a link that’s accessible. http://tdw.globeinvestor.com/servlet/ArticleNews/commentarystory/GIGOLD/20080917/pape17/home/home?back_url=yes

  • 7 Xenko // Sep 19, 2008 at 11:02 am

    Your hockey article link goes to the last page of the article, not the first page. You should fix the link.

  • 8 Canadian Capitalist // Sep 19, 2008 at 11:23 am

    Al: After reading your comment, I tried and was able to log in.

    John: Mr. Pape’s argument is non-sense. It goes something like this — 100% of ETFs lag their index but some active funds beat the index. Voila! Active funds are better. That’s true if you were fortunate enough to own fund A that beat the index this year, fund B that beat the index the year before, fund C that did well the year before that. Trouble is, there is nobody who is able to pick these market beating funds before they beat the index.

    It’s true that “active fund managers CAN move into defensive stocks and/or build cash reserves”. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that they have been able to consistently do so.

    Xenko: Thanks, I’ll fix it.

Leave a Comment