How Often Should You Check Your Investment Portfolio?
Investors habitually check their portfolios far more often than needed, turning long‑term investing into a daily emotional roller‑coaster. Behavioral research shows daily market moves are a near‑coin‑flip, and loss‑aversion makes losses feel twice as painful as gains feel good, leading to chronic dissatisfaction. Studies by Kahneman, Thaler and Carlson demonstrate that infrequent feedback—quarterly or annual reviews—yields higher risk‑taking and better returns, while the modern app environment fuels myopic loss aversion. The article recommends redesigning the investment environment, not relying on willpower, to protect investors from needless stress and sub‑optimal performance.
Why Your Inflation Hedge Protects Against the Wrong Kind of Inflation
New research by Fang, Liu and Roussanov shows that assets marketed as inflation hedges—stocks, REITs, commodities and gold—only offset energy‑driven price spikes, while they provide little or negative protection against core inflation, which accounts for about 71 % of CPI. The...
Who Really Benefits when Private Equity Buys Your Financial Adviser?
UK financial‑advice firms are moving from a frenzy of private‑equity buyouts aimed at scale to a more deliberate phase focused on vertical integration and data‑driven control. The 2026 NextWealth report shows 72% of recent deals involve private equity, but the...
The Star Manager Myth: How a Phantom Stock-Picker Beat the Market
A phantom portfolio constructed from every leveraged single‑stock ETF launch between August 2022 and April 2026 generated a 38.9% annualised return, nearly double the Nasdaq Composite. The basket, equal‑weighted across 179 stocks, added each ticker on the ETF’s inception day, capturing pre‑launch...
The Disposition Effect: Why Losing Investors Keep Getting Worse
New research on 189,530 Chinese retail investors shows that prior losses amplify the disposition effect by roughly 10%, while prior gains dampen it. The bias—selling winners early and holding losers—creates a self‑reinforcing “doom loop” that hurts portfolio performance, especially for...
AI Can Predict 71% of What Your Fund Manager Does
Harvard researchers have built a machine‑learning model that can anticipate 71% of the next trade direction of active fund managers using only public data. The study finds that the most predictable managers consistently underperform, while the least predictable generate significant...
Why Gold's Inflation Hedge Fails in a Crisis
Gold is widely marketed as an inflation hedge, but 126 years of data show it falters when inflation exceeds 3%. In the February 2026 Iran‑related oil shock, gold briefly spiked to $5,400/oz before falling 10‑12% as higher rates eroded its...
Why Policy Uncertainty Is a Terrible Guide to Investing
Policy uncertainty, measured by the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index, has surged to near‑record levels amid geopolitical tensions, yet the market‑risk gauge VIX remains only modestly elevated. Academic research shows the two metrics are weakly correlated (0.58) and often diverge, meaning...
Are Government Bonds Really Safe?
Three centuries of UK and US government bond data reveal that bonds are safe in recessions but vulnerable during wars, pandemics and geopolitical shocks. Recent events have pushed 10‑year UK gilt yields to 5.07%, the highest since 2008, and a...
100 Years, 29,000 Stocks, 46 Winners: The Case for Indexing Just Got Stronger
A new century‑long study by Hendrik Bessembinder shows that just 46 out of nearly 30,000 U.S. stocks accounted for half of $91 trillion in shareholder wealth creation, down from 89 firms in his 2018 analysis. The median stock delivered a -6.9%...
How Much of Your Portfolio Should Be in Stocks?
A new Yale working paper challenges the ubiquitous “100‑minus‑your‑age” rule for equity allocation, showing it costs investors about 2 % of lifetime consumption compared with the true optimum. The research treats future salary as human capital—a bond‑like asset that dramatically shifts...
The Hidden Cost of Trading in Retirement
A 2025 working paper tracking 59,105 Swedish investors shows that after retirement trading frequency rises by about 7.7% and portfolio holdings increase 8.2%, yet risk‑adjusted returns (Carhart alpha) fall roughly 0.6 percentage points. The same pattern mirrors the UK, where...
Does AI Accentuate Investor Biases?
Investors are rapidly adopting AI tools for research and decision support, hoping the technology will eliminate emotional bias. Two recent studies, one from the CFA Institute and another by Bini et al., find the opposite: AI mirrors investor biases, especially attention...
Your Fund Family Has Outperformed? Yeah, Right
The FT Alphaville piece exposes how active fund families, exemplified by Capital Group, cherry‑pick start dates, benchmarks, and gross‑of‑fees figures to make outperformance claims look better than they are. While Capital Group touts a 91% inception‑to‑2025 beat rate, net‑of‑fees numbers...
Scott Adams: Cartoonist, Divisive Commentator, Scourge of Active Managers
Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, used his globally‑read comic strip to launch a sustained critique of active fund management, portraying it as a costly scam through the character Dogbert. His personal experience—losing money to a Wells Fargo‑managed portfolio that invested...