Some interesting financial and investing posts I ran across this week, plus a few decent articles from the newspapers.
I read a good article recently on how to construct an Ivy League fund using exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
The original article was for American investors. Here’s how British readers can do the same thing.
But why would you want an Ivy League style fund?
Well, the endowment funds of Ivy League universities like Yale and Harvard have historically achieved excellent returns, with less volatility than an index tracker.
Their success is partly because of special opportunities we can’t easily replicate, such as access to good hedge funds.
But they’ve also done well because of asset allocation, which we can copy with ETFs.
A couple of months ago I wrote a post entitled ‘Who isn’t buying this market right now?’
Shares were in freefall. The UK FTSE 100 had just hit 3,500 – a low not seen for a decade.
But as I wrote:
If you’re not trickling money into the markets at these levels then I think you might as well forget stock market investing altogether.
Since then the FTSE 100 has gone up over 20%, with some markets and shares doing much better. We could well be in a new bull market.
My March post wasn’t a claim I could time the market bottom, and this isn’t a boast that I did so. Besides, share prices could easily go back down from here.
My point was that you had to stand aside from the extreme negative press and plunge in if you were a long-term investor. You had to look at the depressed valuations, and remember that the best time to buy is when everyone else is in despair.
Today I read an article from Alan Steel, a fund manager, that backed up this view with a compelling list of historical parallels.
A couple of readers have asked me what I think about the MPs’ expenses scandal that’s turned the British Isles into a Banana Republic.
My first thought is Banana Republic politics is rather fitting for the UK today, given our dire national finances, unelected leader and last week’s threat to our debt’s AAA status.
Beyond that, the expenses row is not a matter of personal finance, or even business and economics.
It’s politics of the most venal kind.
Some interesting financial and investing posts I ran across this week, plus a few decent articles from the newspapers.
