Alpha Wounds: Bad Adjunct Methodologies

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Sep 2, 2015 in Alpha Wounds, Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments Active management has taken a lot of body blows recently. The principal criticism: Active managers contribute no alpha once their fees are factored in. So is it time to write active management’s obituary? Not quite. But active management certainly is feeling pain. A few weeks ago, I argued that many of the alpha wounds plaguing active management are self-inflicted. But this month, I will...
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Alpha Wounds: Benchmark Tail Wags the Portfolio Management Dog

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jul 28, 2015 in Alpha Wounds, Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments Active management is under siege from many corners, including passive investment advocates, robo-advisers, academics, and individual investors. The narrative, of course, is that active managers add no alpha after fees. Is active management dead? Hardly. But active management is certainly wounded. And many of these alpha wounds are self-inflicted. This and other forthcoming articles will seek to...
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The Little Worm That Is Destroying Capitalism

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jun 15, 2015 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments In response to the Great Recession, central banks continue to engage in massive monetary stimulus to artificially depress the costs of capital. Many commentators have expressed concerns (and I concur) about the inflationary forces they believe must naturally be building up because of this stimulus. Yet, very few commentators have discussed the consequential little worm that is destroying...
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The Top Five Accounting Mistakes Analysts Make

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on May 12, 2015 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments Prior to entering graduate school almost 20 years ago, I had a very important phone conversation with an analyst at the Dreyfus Founders Funds, Chuck Reed. That brief phone conversation changed my focus in graduate school — and hence my life. One of the questions I asked Chuck was, “What skills should I acquire that most analysts overlook?” He answered unequivocally, saying, “Most analysts do...
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Margin of Safety: The Lost Art

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Apr 7, 2015 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments In another era, Benjamin Graham, one of history’s greatest investors, opined in The Intelligent Investor about the importance of including a margin of safety in assessing the quality of any investment: “to distill the secret of sound investment into three words, we venture the motto, MARGIN OF SAFETY.” Graham’s many adherents, including the fabulously successful Warren Buffett, Bruce...
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Skills That Separate You as an Investment Manager: Context Creation

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jan 6, 2015 in Best of the Blog, Blog, Skills That Separate You as an Investment Manager | 0 comments For nearly a year now I have been discussing skills that separate you as an investment manager. Wide territory is covered in other articles in the series, ranging from introspection to scaling. Context creation, this month’s subject, takes advantage of intuition, creativity, and a person’s knowledge. Like other topics discussed so far, I address context creation at length in my book The...
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