The Guru Investor

David Samra, Top International Stock Picker, Sees Buying Opportunity

Bloomberg reports that David Samra, the Artisan Partners fund manager who won Morningstar’s international stock manager rankings for picks during the 2008 crisis and again in 2013, sees opportunity in the current market turmoil. “We welcome these types of markets,” Samra said. He maintained that market has become “very greedy” in the past few years, which he said created a selling opportunity.…

Ed Yardeni’s Optimistic View of the U.S. Economy

Ed Yardeni of Yardeni Research recently told Barron’s he expects a “difficult and choopy” year, but “the U.S. will come out of this in good stead.” He observed that “the risks of global recession outside the U.S. have increased,” but noted that “it this drags the U.S. into a recession, it would be the first time it has happened.” Yardeni explained part of the recent downturn by noting that “when…

John P. Reese looks at Graham, Buffett, and value investing "Superinvestors":

Collectively, mutual fund managers have a very poor track record. But while the pros struggle mightily to beat their benchmarks, that doesn’t mean that beating the market is impossible, Validea CEO John P. Reese writes in his latest Seeking Alpha column.

“In a 1984 speech he gave at Columbia University entitled ‘The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville’, [Warren] Buffett examined the…

GMO’s James Montier on Fed-Induced Bubbles, Alpha, and More

  James Montier of Grantham Mayo van Otterloo’s (GMO’s) Asset Allocation team spoke with Advisor Perspectives recently about interest rates, behavioral biases, and other key factors affecting markets. He said that unlike the longest-serving Fed governor William McChesney Martin, who said the central bank’s job is to “take the punch bowl away just when the party was getting interesting,” recently…

Recent Correction Brings Opportunity says Karabell

In a piece for Barron’s, Zachary Karabell, head of global strategy at Envestnet, argues that recent changes in equities markets should be seen as a normal correction that offers opportunities. He debunks the argument for a bear market with three points. First, he says, that current “global weakness . . . is insufficient to fuel a financial market meltdown,” noting that signs of recession are…

Hulbert: Stay in Equities Through a Bear Market

In his column for Barron’s, Mark Hulbert reports that his analysis shows that “the best bear market strategy may very well be to stay 100% invested in equities.” He says that looking at the data on Hulbert Financial Digest-monitored advisors suggests this approach because “each of the top-five advisors for performance since March 2000 is fully invested right now” and those who switched to cash…

Technology and a Decline in Economic Growth

Stony Brook finance professor Noah Smith briefly critiques Northwestern University professor Robert Gordon’s argument that “the golden days of growth are over” in a recent BloombergView post. Smith summarizes Gordon’s recent book as arguing that a few key technological inventions catapulted growth from 1870 to 1970, but that the low-hanging fruit is now gone and so growth has necessarily slowed.…

Top Market Timers Are Bullish

Mark Hulbert reports at Market Watch that, based on his survey, “the stock market timers with the best records are bullish, on balance, while those with the worst records are bearish.” He notes that this remains true when periods ranging from 12-months to 20-years are used to assess performance. Further, “since the stock market over [the last 12 months] has declined by about 10%, and turned in…

“Superstocks” Give Investors a Reason to Invest in Index Funds

A Wall Street Journal blog post by Jason Zweig profiles “superstocks” and suggests they provide a “reason why, for most people, index funds make superior sense.” Zweig notes that 44 U.S. stocks have generated cumulative returns of 10,000% or more over the last 30 years, and borrows the term “superstock” from William Bernstein of Efficient Frontier Advisors to describe stocks that grew at least…

Value Investor Bill Miller Sees Opportunity in Low Stock Prices

Bill Miller of Legg Mason, a value investor with a strong record, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that it is “sort of hard to see why anyone would buy a 10-year Treasury when they could own the broader marketat a higher current yield.” He sees “a disconnect between what’s really going on and what the markets are reacting to,” citing “strength in homebuilding,” “70% of companies are beating earnings…

Margin Debt as Indicator: Bearish Signals Writes Hulbert

In his MarketWatch column, Mark Hulbert highlights the use of margin debt as a market indicator. Margin debt is the total amount investors borrow to purchase stocks. As Hulbert notes, research by Norman Fosback, former president of the Institute for Econometric Research, concludes that “a good long-term indicator can be created by comparing total margin debt with its 12-month moving average.” If…

Charles Schwab CIO Liz Ann Sonders Sees the Market Within a Bull Pattern

Liz Ann Sonders of Charles Schwab offered a cautiously bullish analysis of the marketat the recent Inside ETFs conference. She cited Sir John Templeton’s statement that “bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism, and die on euphoria.” She sees the current market in the “mature” phase of the bull cycle. “I don’t want to dismiss any of the concerns out there about…

Jeremy Siegel’s Critique of the Shiller P/E Ratio and His Market Outlook

  Financial Advisor reports on Wharton School of Finance Professor Jeremey Siegel’s comments at the annual Inside ETFs conference, where he critiqued the widely used Shiller P/E Ratio. Siegel did not necessarily attack the original logic of the Shiller P/E (which won its creator, Robert Shiller, a Nobel Prize). Instead, he noted that changes to the definition of generally accepted accounting…

Jeremy Grantham, Jonathan Jacobson, Seth Klarman and Jeffrrey Vinik: “Below the Radar” Philanthropy of Top Investors to Social Causes

The Boston Globe profiles philanthropy by leading investors. Jeremy Grantham’s foundations, including the $377 million Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, reflect a movement toward “making big bets on social change philanthropy,” according to Paul Grogan of the Boston Foundation. This is a shift apparent in Grantham’s own remarks: he noted that giving to traditional…

Study: Execution Key Differentiating Trait of Successful Investors

Lee Freeman-Shor of Old Mutual Global Investors authored a piece for the AAII Journal that identifies differences in the strategies of investors who win or lose over time. After analyzing over 30,000 trades by 45 investors over seven years, he concluded that the difference is not in whether their ideas are right (“the chance of a great idea making money was a lousy 49%”) but in their execution…

Ackman’s Argues the Ill Effect of Index Funds on the Market

Barron’s reports on Pershing Square Capital manager Bill Ackman’s latest letter to shareholders, in which he sharply criticizes index funds. Ackman suggests that index funds are making the U.S like Japan, where the “system of cross-corporate ownership, the keiretsu, has been blamed for decades of Japanese corporate underperformance and market malaise.” He writes that “at current rates of inflows,…