Invest Skeptically

Today’s blog is about mutual fund fees. More specifically, the following are some links from other people on the internet ranting about how evil they are.
Here’s a column by Robert Kiyosaki at Yahoo! Finance, here’s another, and another, by Duncan Hood at Canadian Business Online, and here’s one by John Chow the famous blogger [...]

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Recently, the media have been talking about CDOs (or Collateralized Debt Obligations) in a manner that makes me wonder if the sky isn’t falling. Fabrice Taylor wrote a piece called, The ABCs of CDOs. Can you spell RISKY? (The Globe and Mail, June 27, 2007) and warns, “there will be shocks, both in [...]

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Ian McGugan writes, Confessions of an unethical investor, for Canadian Business Online and discloses his own “unethical” portfolio.
He writes: “It’s my experience that as long as a company operates within the law, intelligent people can debate its ethical stature from now until dividend day without reaching a conclusion [...] Ethical investing assumes that somebody — [...]

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In Part 1 we looked at how endpoint bias and survivor bias can be used by marketers to make their funds look better in their sales materials. Today we’ll discuss some additional information that you should look for when evaluating funds. These are examples of information that help to give you a sense [...]

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Here are two great articles from the Zephyr Associates Inc. website on Mutual Fund Analysis and Peer Group Analysis. They discuss the curses of endpoint bias and survivor bias that skews the analysis of mutual funds.
Endpoint bias can be seen in typical mutual fund ads that compare, for example, 1-year, 3-year, and 5-year returns versus [...]

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