I strive to be smart, wise, analytical, creative, intuitive, and informative. I hope to help make you a better active investment management pro.
I recommend you start with the Best of the Blog.
Return of the Active Manager is now out!
FYI, my new book Return of the Active Manager, co-authored with Athena Invest’s CIO C. Thomas Howard, PhD, is released today. We have received much advanced praise for our work. For example… Wow! I expected a terrific book from Howard and Voss, but ROAM knocked me back. It’s a once-a-decade genre-defining must-have-on-every-investor’s-bookshelf type of book. Read this and your wealth (and life!) will be wiser and smoother for it. – Richard L. Peterson M.D., author of ‘Inside the Investor’s Brain’ (Wiley, 2007)...
read moreThe Most Misunderstood Investing Topics: Alpha is Creativity
In this edition of The Most Misunderstood Investing Concepts I discuss the notion that α is creativity. In case you have missed other pieces in this series here are links to each of them: Fair value and its evil twin, target price; Time horizon and its subterranean influence on investors’ thinking; PEG ratios and the ignorance of the math underlying them; When valuing a business, growth is not free!; and, Risk does not equal volatility. Creativity is Ignored If I were to ask an audience of investment professionals to name the most...
read moreThe Most Misunderstood Investing Concepts: Risk ≠ Volatility
If you have followed my writing for any length of time you surely know that I hate the concept of volatility in investing. It is used as a proxy for risk and honestly that is a disaster for our industry, and for our end clients. Though I have covered this ground previously, I do not think I have covered it in as detailed a fashion as I do below. First, though, here are the other editions of this series on The Most Misunderstood Investing Concepts: Fair value and its evil twin, target price; Time horizon and its subterranean influence on...
read moreThe Most Misunderstood Investing Concepts: Growth is Not Free
My absence from the writing stage is a great example of life disagreeing with your priorities. In case you did not know it, I started a new business in February, Active Investment Management (AIM) Consulting, LLC. Those of you starting your own business know just what this entails. Ironically this plays into this article’s theme. Apologies for my long absence. Time and space are clearing, and I am returning to my bi-weekly missives on investing. Before all things in my life got intense, I started a series on what I feel are The Most...
read moreRetirement is a Stupid Conversation for Customers
How could I possibly say that our industry’s most sacred customer conversation cow – RETIREMENT – is a stupid conversation for customers? Here is how… Financial Professionals Have Never Retired Themselves Have you ever stopped to consider something patently obvious; that overwhelmingly the financial professional proffering retirement advice to our customers has themselves never retired? This is like being given advice on how to ride a bicycle from someone who has never ridden one. It is entirely possible to describe technically,...
read moreThe Most Misunderstood Investing Concepts: PEG Ratios
This is part three in a multi-part series on the most misunderstood investing concepts with this edition covering that classic valuation short-hand, the PEG Ratio. As a brief review, article one discussed many in the investment business do not fully understand fair value, while article two expressed my belief that time horizon is also a classic source of confusion. Despite having authored an extended deep dive research paper on the “The Fallacy of PEG Ratios” way back in 2011 for the Journal of Private Equity, I still hear the PEG ratio used...
read moreThe Most Misunderstood Investing Concepts: Time Horizon
Several weeks ago, I began a new series of articles. In that first piece I discussed that fair value is one of the most misunderstood investing concepts. This edition discusses time horizon and the ways in which it is misunderstood. Time Horizon Is Usually Subterranean I have said for years that almost every debate in investing and between investors can be resolved by first having everyone stop and disclose their assumption for time horizon. The next time you find yourself in a discussion about investing where there is disagreement let...
read more26 March 2019: Calcbench Master Class
A webinar done in conjunction with Calcbench – one of my favorite sources of financial data – on some of the top mistakes investors make when doing analysis, and how to avoid them. If you are one of that rarest of investors, those that do their own analysis, I cannot recommend Calcbench’s platform enough as the best resource in the world for firms’ accounting data.
read moreThe Most Misunderstood Investing Concepts: Fair Value
To my many loyal readers who have asked where I have been for the last several months, my apologies for the absence. I have been busy with many projects, including the launching of my new business Active Investment Management (AIM) Consulting, LLC. I would love to earn your trust as my client! Next, I have been putting the finishing touches on a recently co-authored book with C. Thomas Howard, my long-time writing partner. You can see us both speak at the forthcoming Behavioral Finance Forum in New York City on 5 April 2019. With that taken...
read moreReal Risk Management: All Risks are Future Risks
In summary of my series so far on Real Risk Management, each of us subjectively has preferences. These preferences, coupled with our chosen contexts, are what creates risk. As an example, if I choose to “beat the market” I have a chosen context of financial markets, and a preference to beat the performance of that market. The risk I’ve created is that I under perform. This may sound elementary and straightforward, but this stands in starkest contrast to the variance, standard deviation, beta, covariance, VAR, et. al. versions of risk...
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