Sometimes we just want to make a point, or start a conversation. These timely posts offer opinions about everything from quantitative finance to baseball stats.
June 5, 2025
This post revisits and refutes a long-standing argument against market timing—that missing just a few of the market’s best days can devastate returns—by demonstrating its logical flaws and statistical irrelevance. Using both historical and out-of-sample data, it shows that the risks and rewards of market timing are more symmetric than commonly portrayed.
Alternative Investing
March 28, 2025
While uncorrelated alternatives can be beneficial, they often fail to significantly impact the overall portfolio. Here, I argue that adding beta to these alternatives can enhance capital efficiency and improve long-term returns. Ultimately, there is a need for a balanced approach to investing in alternatives, including a combination of aggressive and equitized strategies.
Portfolio Risk and Performance
March 21, 2025
Options-based strategies, often labeled with words like “Buffered,” “Overlay,” and “Defined Outcome” have amassed a sizeable chunk of investors’ money, lured by the promise of market-like returns with less risk. These strategies use options to capture the upside or downside of an asset’s returns, and managers who employ a mix of options can tailor an asset’s risk/return profile to align with an investor’s goals. But can they actually deliver?
Asset Allocation
January 2, 2025
Well, sitting here in the year 2025 and looking back at our endowment’s returns for the last decade is not a pleasant task. World markets have been subpar and our performance relative to world markets has been simply terrible. Hard times are never pleasant. But they have one upside. We can learn from them.
Alternative Investing
September 4, 2024
This note argues that good higher-volatility alternative investments, that are indeed often very hard to stick with, can be important tools in constructing the best overall portfolio. I think if (a big if) investors can stick with them, they are often a more effective tool than their lower-volatility cousins. Basically, I think they are underutilized
Alternative Investing
September 3, 2024
I argue that over the past 30+ years markets have become less informationally efficient in the relative pricing of common stocks, particularly over medium horizons
May 20, 2024
Continuing my occasional foray into sports analytics, in this post I look at the President's Trophy curse. This ubiquitous observation can be summed up as “the winner of the President’s Trophy, awarded for the best record in the regular season, usually doesn’t go on to win the Stanley Cup. Thus, winning the trophy is cursed.” The President’s Trophy winner usually doesn’t win The Cup. It’s true, and yet it’s still really dumb.
