# Posts Tagged ‘ Fund management in general ’

## Replacing market indices

April 2, 2012
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If equity markets suddenly sprang into existence now, would we create market indices? I’m doubtful. Why an index? The Dow Jones Industrial Average was born in 1896.  This was when computers were humans with adding machines (but they did do parallel processing).  At that point boiling “the market” down to a single number had value. … Continue reading...

## What does ‘passive investing’ really mean?

February 20, 2012
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We know the words but what do they mean? Some definitions Here are some definitions of “passive investment management”. Investopedia says: A style of management associated with mutual and exchange-traded funds (ETF) where a fund’s portfolio mirrors a market index. Wikipedia says: Passive management (also called passive investing) is a financial strategy in which an investor (or … Continue reading...

## Risk parity

October 31, 2011
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Some thoughts and resources regarding a popular fund management buzzword. The idea Given asset categories (like stocks, bonds and commodities) create a portfolio where each category contributes equally to the portfolio variance. Two operations There are two cases in creating a risk parity portfolio: the universe is the asset categories the universe is the assets … Continue reading...

## Testing an S&P 500 prediction

July 10, 2011
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If a particular prediction comes true, how surprised should we be? The prediction The page that sparked my curiosity tells of a prediction made a year ago that the S&P 500 would beat its historic high by the end of 2011.  It says that at the point the prediction was made, the level of the … Continue reading...

## Market arrows

June 16, 2011
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Graphs like Figure 1 are reasonably common.  But they are not reasonable. Figure 1: A (log) price series with an explicit guide line. Some have the prices on a logarithmic scale, which is an improvement on the raw prices. The problem with this sort of plot is that two particular data points are taken as … Continue reading...

## Paying interest and the number e

January 24, 2011
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Suppose I borrow a dollar from you and I’ll pay you 100% interest at the end of the year.  How much money will you have then? $1 * (1 + 1) =$2 What happens if instead the interest is calculated as  50% twice in the year? $1 * (1.5 * 1.5) =$2.25 After … Continue reading...

## Some market predictions

January 6, 2011
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We look at a few forecasts for the year 2011 that we’ve run across, and compare them with the prediction distributions presented in Revised market prediction distributions. FTSE 100 There is a “range forecast” on an Interactive Investor page of 5350 to 6565.  It isn’t clear (to me at least) what this means, but I … Continue reading...

## Revised market prediction distributions

January 4, 2011
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This provides revised plots of the prediction distributions published yesterday.  The previous plots of prediction distributions should be ignored — they are not doing as advertised. We show the prediction distribution of levels of several equity indices (plus oil price) at the end of 2011 assuming nothing happens.  That is, we’ve taken out market trends … Continue reading...

## Creating prediction distributions

January 4, 2011
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Here we give details and code for the prediction distributions exhibited in yesterday’s blog post Tis the season to predict. Eight years of returns The equity indices use daily closing levels from the start of 2003.  This data comes from Yahoo. A roughly equivalent technique of selecting the last 2000 daily prices is used for … Continue reading...