Blog: Cutting Through the Noise
Personal Investing
Favourites and Unpredictability
Excerpt from Tom Bradley's blog on February 22, 2010
Located in Vancouver and being the sports (analogy) junkies that we are, readers would expect us to go crazy with Olympic stuff. Certainly there are obvious connections between Olympics and investing - the value of time; the notion of risk and reward (the topic of...Read More
Tom on BNN
Excerpt from Scott Ronalds's blog on February 8, 2010
Tom was on BNN this morning (Feb 8) with Marty Cej and Frances Horodelski. Topics of discussion included: What to do at this stage in the market; How to reflect caution in your portfolio; and ETFs. The seven minute piece brings together some key messages from Tom’s...Read More
Reaching Further
Excerpt from Tom Bradley's blog on February 8, 2010
Call it an interesting juxtaposition. A few pages after my column on reaching for yield a couple of weeks back, there was a back page ad for the MINT Income Fund. Since then, the ad has been running constantly in the national papers. MINT, which is an existing closed...Read More
Compared to What?
Excerpt from Tom Bradley's blog on February 1, 2010
"The lower-hanging fruit is largely gone...but the return profiles are still attractive, relative to the extremely low cost of funding." This innocuous quote from Peter Schoenfeld is very telling. In an article about the outlook for hedge fund strategies in 2010 in Barron’s...Read More
More Reaching
Excerpt from Tom Bradley's blog on January 26, 2010
The discipline of writing 800-900 words for the Globe and Mail every two weeks means that stuff gets left on the cutting room floor. But as I’m learning, that’s usually where it belongs. Having said that, I did want to add an addendum to my last installment...Read More
A Trading Nation
Excerpt from Tom Bradley's blog on December 29, 2009
I love reading sports statistics and box scores (the Suns beat the Lakers last night and Nash had 16 points, 13 assists and was 5 for 11 from the field), but I’ve never been much for economic data. Yesterday on the plane, however, I was scanning the economic...
Read More
The Hard Questions - Part III: Getting Back In
Excerpt from Tom Bradley's blog on December 16, 2009
Maybe the hardest conversations we have today are with prospective investors who got out of equities in 2008 or early this year and did not get back in. What do they do now? There is really just one answer to the question and then a bunch of execution issues...Read More
The Hard Questions - Part II: Inflation and Rising Rates
Excerpt from Tom Bradley's blog on December 10, 2009
Interest rates have a profound effect on portfolio returns. The level of rates sets a base for on-going income and changes in rates affects security prices. As rates drop, bond prices rise and vice versa. The 25-year bull market for bonds and stocks that...Read More
The Hard Questions - Part I: The U.S. Dollar
Excerpt from Tom Bradley's blog on December 3, 2009
Chris, Sher and I were out meeting prospective clients last week and there were a few questions/concerns that came up over and over again. For the most part we have discussed them in the blog, but it struck me that we could be more direct in...Read More
Caution Clarified
Excerpt from Tom Bradley's blog on November 19, 2009
In my recent article, The Party is Rolling Again, so be Cautious, I throw a little cold water on the market rally we’re enjoying. I think it’s important to reiterate how a view like this relates to an investor’s asset mix. The key line in the article is near the end – “I've...Read More
Housing Stocks Make me Squeamish; I'm Glad We've Got a New One
Excerpt from Scott Ronalds's blog on November 4, 2009
Housing stocks make me squeamish. It was painful to watch them fall like a rock over the last couple of years as the U.S. real estate market imploded. A number of companies faced bankruptcy or saw their share prices slashed due to stretched balance sheets...
Read More
A Pop Quiz
Excerpt from Tom Bradley's blog on October 28, 2009
Quick. It’s February 28th, 2010. The Olympics are just ending and you have to make a last minute RRSP contribution. What would you do? Five seconds. Four. Three. Two. One. Time is up. OK. If you answered: Put it in the Money Market Fund and think about...Read More
