Jason Apollo Voss | Best of the Blog

Beware the Alpha Sharks! High-Frequency Trading and Its Impact on Markets

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jul 28, 2013 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments Maureen O’Hara, professor of finance at Cornell University, and member of the Systemic Risk Council has a warning to traditional investment managers, i.e., low frequency traders (LFT): High-frequency trading (HFT) is now the norm, and it is not going away. Continuing to pretend that HFT has no effect on your investments and on your alpha is at best naïve and at worst ignorant. Need proof? New...
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A Bond Convexity Primer

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jun 25, 2013 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments As the US Federal Reserve lays the verbal groundwork for an eventual real-world quantitative easing (QE) taper, bond prices are dropping at an accelerated rate. In order to understand the ramifications of a Federal Reserve taper on the prices of a bond or bond portfolio, what is needed is a bond convexity primer. In the parlance of those who know calculus, convexity is the second derivative. For...
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Behavioral Portfolio Management: Emotions and Volatility Are Key to Successful Implementation

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jun 12, 2013 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments Our intial discussion with C. Thomas Howard about his “Behavioral Portfolio Management” has done so well we thought you would like to read more of the discussion about how to deploy behavioral finance practically. Particularly germane to implementing behavioral portfolio management is understanding Howard’s views on emotions and volatility, and how he handles them when managing...
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Behavioral Portfolio Management: An Alternative to Modern Portfolio Theory

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Jun 4, 2013 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments Seeking to bridge the divide between modern portfolio theory and behavioral finance, is C. Thomas Howard’s “Behavioral Portfolio Management.” Howard is professor emeritus at Daniels College of Business, University of Denver, and co-founder of AthenaInvest. Application of his behavioral portfolio management has resulted in Athena’s longest running portfolio, Athena Pure...
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An R-Squared Chart Taxonomy: Seeing Is Not Believing

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on May 15, 2013 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments Often financial analysts are presented with statistical charts that purport to demonstrate an important — and, of course, investable — relationship between data points. These charts are supposed to be worth a thousand words and thousands of shares traded. But invariably these charts do not have an r-squared for the data displayed, or any other descriptive statistical data; just the seductive...
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Leading from the Center: Dalio, Hagan, and Freeman on Meditation and Leadership

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Apr 11, 2013 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments Georgetown University’s McDonough Business School played host to a watershed event in the history of business school education on 9 April 2013. Dean David Thomas announced that Georgetown is going to teach meditation to its business school students in a semester-long course. This first-of-its-kind class seeks to convey the benefits of meditation, which have been espoused by Ray Dalio, the...
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Eurozone Crisis: Could Informal Problem-Solving Mechanisms Prove the Conventional Wisdom Wrong?

Posted by Jason Apollo Voss on Mar 29, 2013 in Best of the Blog, Blog | 0 comments Conventional wisdom holds that the lack of a legal framework for political and monetary union makes policy coordination within the EU and the eurozone impossible. Instead of solving crises, finance ministers race from one disaster to the next, with no real resolution. When such a lack of structure collides with excessive debt and negative economic growth, the thinking goes, there is only one...
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