The San Diego Foundation bills itself as grantmaking for San Diego nonprofits and our community. As a San Diego resident, I can’t help but like that mission statement. In fact, I’m even disposed to help the Foundation achieve its mission. How? With a portfolio analysis, of course! The Theoretical Problem with San Diego Foundation Endowment […]
Why Drawdown Correlation Is a Metric Worth Considering
Why is Drawdown Correlation a metric worth considering? More than that, what is Drawdown Correlation? If correlation measures the performance of one investment relative to another over time, then drawdown correlation makes that measurement only when that first investment is in decline. (Full disclosure: I had not yet found a term that describes correlation exclusively […]
John Turner of Live Oak Bank on Succession & Exit Planning
What Is Live Oak Bank? John Turner is the senior lending advisor for Investment Advisory Vertical (Industry) at Live Oak Bank. (If you haven’t heard of Live Oak Bank, you’ve likely never used Succession Link, where Live Oak’s ads are plastered everywhere.) Live Oak bank specializes in financing financial advisory business succession plans. What quantifies specialization? Last […]
Annuity Rule of Thumb
As a fee-only financial adviser and fiduciary, much of what I do at Define Financial involves unwinding new clients from the garbage they were previously sold by commissioned salespeople. (Naturally, I have a strong opinion about this!) Sometimes, this means trying to figure out how to get a client out of a non-traded REIT. Other […]
Follow-up to my Article on Dollar-Cost Averaging & CAPE in the FPA’s Journal of Financial Planning
I had an article published in the Journal of Financial Planning on dollar-cost averaging. You can read it here. You can also download a Powerpoint presentation version of it here. I have received the same questions from advisers over and over again, both in person at presentations, and via email from those who had read […]
Endowment Investing Case Study: Ball State University
For my master’s thesis, I explored the investment performance of several multi-million dollar endowment portfolios. In eight case studies, the results consistently showed that a low-cost portfolio outperformed a portfolio paying high fees to access active managers and alternative asset classes. Moreover, risk-adjusted performance showed the low-cost portfolio simply did better. (Previous analysis has shown […]