Advanced Investing

As many of you already know, we have been working hard to figure out the best way to model expected stock returns for financial planning and asset allocation. It has a lot of history in financial literature, which is to be expected, given the importance of the figure.

Where do stock returns actually come from? The answers to this deceptively simple question might change your investing perspective. We dive into this foundational investing topic after sharing community updates and chatting about our books and TV series of the week.

For the first part of today’s discussion, we are joined by Don Coletti from The Central Bank of Canada. He is here to talk about their upcoming recommendation for a monetary policy framework for the next five years which is incorporating public feedback into its development through the survey, Lets Talk Inflation.

Joining us on the Rational Reminder today is one of the pioneers in the space of evidence-based investing, and someone who has been a massive inspiration to us, Mark Hebner! His website, Index Fund Advisors, was one of the first to start explaining the ideas of an evidence-based approach and the power of indexing, way back in the 1990s.

The hype to invest in high-cap tech companies is deafening. In this episode, we share what you need to know before buying FANG company stocks. Although FANG is the popular term, our analysis includes Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Tesla, and Microsoft — so it’s closer to the less slick-sounding FAAATM.

What if you ONLY want exposure to foreign stock markets, without the potentially damaging currency exposure of unhedged ETFs? This is where currency-hedged ETFs can be useful. If you could eliminate your foreign currency exposure, you would no longer need to be concerned with its fluctuations, right?

If asset prices reflect expectations about the future, the market rising should be viewed with optimism, but there might be less optimism, and there may even be pessimism, about a market that is being artificially propped up by a central bank. What if the central bank can’t print any more money and stock prices drop? And how can all of this money printing be good for the country’s currency?

Quantitative easing is a monetary policy whereby a central bank buys government bonds or other financial assets in order to inject money into the economy to expand economic activity. But what exactly does that mean?

In keeping with our recent tide of incredible guests, today’s one is no exception. Dr. William Bernstein, a financial theorist, advisor, and neurologist, joins us to share some of his incredible insights. As the author of several seminal books such as The Intelligent Asset Allocator and The Four Pillars of Investing, Dr. Bernstein has made his mark applying his medical evidence-based approach to investing.

As the expression goes, another day, another dollar. Today’s episode is a roundup of news and analysis with deeper dives into behavioural and risk-based market explanations, active management, and endowment investing models.