By Robert Bacarella | July 25, 2018 Warren Buffett won his million-dollar 10-year charitable wager that passive would outperform active, as he highlighted in his shareholder letter this spring. In a nutshell, Buffett and a fund of hedge funds called Protégé Partners entered a charitable wager about whether a selection of five funds-of-funds would outperform the S&P 500 Index [...]

By Robert Bacarella | July 10, 2018 One of the most difficult portfolio management decisions is when to sell a security. If a stock price is falling, first determine whether the decline is market-related or for a company-specific reason. For market-related declines, factor in price movement relative to the market and the company’s industry sector.  A security should be [...]

By Robert Bacarella | June 26, 2018 Portfolio management is somewhat like gardening. Just as you need to prune your garden to keep if flourishing, so must you prune your portfolio. You need to pick through your holdings, isolate the underperformers and determine whether they are flowers to be nurtured or weeds to be removed. In a narrow market, [...]

By Robert Bacarella | May 2, 2018 I haven’t been in the investment business as long as Warren Buffett, but in over forty years of observing the industry, I’ve seen a lot—and certainly enough that I’m not surprised Warren Buffett won his 10-year bet that a passive index would outperform a group of hand-selected active managers. The bet is [...]

By Robert Bacarella | April 4, 2018 During the dot-com turmoil of 2001, New York Times reporter Gretchen Morgenson wrote a powerful article titled “Price Targets are Hazardous to Investors’ Health.”[1] Morgenson won a Pulitzer Prize for that article and others in which she dug into highly questionable assumptions and practices in the investment industry. It seems obvious in retrospect that high-flying [...]

By Robert Bacarella | March 8, 2018 After coming off a banner year in 2017 with the Dow Jones Industrial Average gaining 25%, some investors were caught off guard by the onslaught of market volatility in early 2018. In this environment—as in nearly all environments—we think it’s clear that investors are wise to stay invested in the market while [...]

By Robert Bacarella | February 16, 2018 By now, just about everybody has seen the ad campaign with the king who calls out “dilly, dilly!” whenever a subject presents him with a gift of Bud Light. The catch-phrase went viral and Anheuser-Busch is rolling out multiple variations on the theme. But it’s worth remembering the original spot, where one [...]