The Evidence-Based Investor

The latest TEBI Podcast, is devoted to the subject of excessive pay among company CEOs. In it I interview two experts on the subject: — Corinne Carr , founder of the remuneration consultancy PeopleNet ; and — Luke Hildyard , Executive Director of the High Pay Centre , which carries out research and analysis on issues relating to executive pay, corporate governance and business performance. Among t...

The most enthusiastic advocate of mindfulness I know is George Kinder. George, better known as the father of the financial life planning movement , has practised mindfulness for most of his life and written books about it. In the latest TEBI Podcast, George explains how mindfulness can help investors achieve better outcomes and live more fulfilled lives.

A former US Marine Corps officer and fighter pilot, Rick Ferri talks about his experiences as a stockbroker at a large Wall Street firm, and how he became disillusioned with the industry, its sales culture and its high fees. He explains how he built a business called Portfolio Solutions, which enabled investors to achieve much better results by cutting the amount of fees and charges they paid. He...

One of the smartest advocates of investing in low-cost index funds and ETFs is Ben Johnson, Director of Global ETF Research at Morningstar. In the latest TEBI Podcast, Ben explains the Morningstar Active/ Passive Barometer, how it differs from the SPIVA scorecard run by S&P Dow Jones Indices, and what we can learn from the data it produces.

Matt’s Hall firm, Hill Investment Group , based in St Louis, recently launched an automated investment solution service called Hillfolio . We sat down to talk to him and one of Hillfolio's directors, PJ McDaniel.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Jeffrey Ptak, Morningstar’s Global Director of Manager Research for the TEBI Podcast.  In the interview Jeff explains Morningstar’s “investors first” philosophy, and how the company has strongly adhered to it through its 35-year history. It’s an important principle, he says, that the “business” side of the operation is kept very separate from the re...

After quitting her job in active management, Stephanie Griffiths started researching the academic evidence on investing and active fund management and concluded that, from a personal point of view, despite her experience and expertise, she was better off putting almost all her money in low-cost index funds. She has since become a financial educator and has just written a book, Sit Still and Prospe...

Moira Somers is a behavioural psychologist, based in Winnipeg in Manitoba. She also advises individuals and organisations about personal finance, and she also works as a consultant to the financial services sector. In this interview, she explains why so many people put off investing for retirement and making important financial decisions (her academic expertise, appropriately, is in procrastinatio...

We talk to Tim Edwards, discussing such topics as SPIVA, the trend towards self-indexing, and recent research he’s done on momentum investing and the case for equal-weight indices. And, for fans of active management, he even spells out the areas where active managers perform least badly.

We’ve all heard about the huge growth in popularity of low-cost investing in the United States. But how is the passive investing revolution progressing in Europe? That’s one of the questions I put to Adam Laird, Head of ETF Strategy at Lyxor ETF for the the latest TEBI Podcast. Lyxor is based in France but also has a sizeable market share in Germany, Italy and Spain. It’s now targeting growth in t...

All of us make mistakes, but, as Sir Winston Churchill once said, only the wise learn from them. What then can we learn from the mistakes of the world’s greatest investors? That’s the question Michael Batnick asks in his new book, Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Moments . Even the most famous investors have dropped clangers; Warren Buffett, Bill Ackman, Jack Bogle, Ben Graham and...

Even those with only a passing interest in investing can’t have failed to notice the extraordinary rise in recent years of ETFs. Exchange traded funds now account for around $4.3 trillion of global assets under management  — up $1 trillion on this time last year. And although the pace of new product launches has slowed, there are now around 6,300 exchange-traded products worldwide. There are...

This week, we speak to Stephen Davis, Senior Fellow and Associate Director of Corporate Governance at Harvard Law School. He’s also one of the authors of What They Do With Your Money: How the Financial System Fails Us and How to Fix It . In the book, he and his co-authors expose the harm caused by the misalignment of interests between financial institutions and investors, and what we can do to pre...

On this week’s podcast we speak to Barry Ritholtz, co-founder and CIO of Ritholtz Wealth Management . Barry is a tireless blogger and advocate for evidence-based investing. It was his team that put on last year’s inaugural EBI conference in New York. Following on from that success, this year the show is travelling west to Dana Point, California. Listen below to find out: How the idea came about fo...

We all know by now about the huge shift taking place from active to passive management in the Anglo-Saxon world, especially the US. But what’s happening in continental Europe? Well, it’s actually in the Netherlands where the move away from active funds is really gathering pace. Our guest on the latest TEBI Podcast , produced and sponsored by Regis Media , is Martijn Rozemuller, managing director o...

Everyone knows by now how phenomenally successful Vanguard has been in the US in the last few years. But it’s not doing badly elsewhere in the world either. For the latest TEBI Podcast, I’ve been interviewing Dr Peter Westaway, Chief Economist and Head of Investment Strategy for Vanguard Europe. Among the questions I ask him are these: Is tit true that markets are more “uncertain” now than they no...

The subject of this week’s TEBI Podcast is ETFs, or exchange-traded funds. ETFs have been all the rage in recent years, soaring in popularity all over the world. In the US, a total of $124 billion has poured into ETFs in the first two months of 2017 — the the most aggressive start to a year since the industry was founded 24 years ago. I’ve been talking to Nizam Hamid, European ETF strategist at Wi...

Kunal Kapoor has just taken over as CEO of Morningstar from the company’s billionaire founder Joe Mansueto. It’s one of the biggest jobs in global investing; Morningstar enjoys huge influence among investment professionals, advisers, journalists and end investors, employing more than 4,200 people around the world. Whatever happens in the investing industry over the next 20 years, Kunal Kapoor is l...

The latest TEBI Podcast, sponsored by Regis Media , is now online and features Larry Swedroe. Larry has just written his eighth book on investing. It’s called Your Complete to Factor-Based Investing, and it was co-authored with Andrew Berkin. In this podcast, I ask him: With more than factors in the so-called “factor zoo” to choose from, has factor-based investing gone too far? How many factors ar...

The guest on this week’s TEBI Podcast is none other than Bill McNabb, CEO and President of Vanguard, the world’s biggest and fastest growing asset management company. This is what we asked him: Brexit and Trump: What can investors learn from the two political stories that shook the world in 2016? What does he make of evidence-based investing? And can we call Vanguard evidence-based? Why does Vangu...

As regular TEBI readers know, the academic evidence overwhelmingly shows that most investors are better off investing in low-cost index funds. But most financial advisers still recommend actively managed funds instead. As a result, investors are ending up with pension pots considerably smaller than they should be. So, is there a case for suing advisers who carry on investing their clients’ money i...

Daniel Egan is Vice-President of Behavioural Finance and Investing at Betterment, the New York City-based automated investment service, or robo-adviser. Although new robo-advisers are launching all around the world, almost without exception they’e struggling to make anything more than modest profits. That notwithstanding, I do believe that automated and partially automated investing are the future...

Over the years I’ve found that some of the stanchest and most effective advocates of evidence-based investing are those who’ve actually worked in the active fund management industry and seen its shortcomings at first hand. Lars Kroijer is one example, and another is Preston McSwain. Preston hails from Birmingham, Alabama, and worked for more than 20 years selling and marketing complex investment p...

For this week’s show I review the inaugural Evidence-Based Investing (EBI) Conference, held earlier this month in New York City. It’s a great listen, with contributions from three of the most prominent thought leaders on the US investing scene — Josh Brown, Barry Ritholtz and Morgan Housel.

Last week, the FCA published its landmark report on asset management . The conclusions were damning about the sorry state of competition in the UK investing industry. In many ways, the findings felt like a vindication for those campaigners who have been highlighting these failings for years. One of those pushing for change is Andy Agathangelou, Founding Chair of the Transparency Task Force. In thi...