Invest Skeptically

One of my CFA textbooks contains a chapter called “Searching for Shenanigans”. It emphasizes that a significant portion of what gets reported in financial statements is subject to management’s judgment and estimates.
This is nothing new to accounting experts. Al Rosen often writes and speaks about accounting trickery as he does in his piece, [...]

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I sometimes get asked to recommend investing-related educational resources. With this in mind I’m starting a new category/tag called “Investor Education”.
Today’s recommendation is a great site called MoneyChimp. According to the site, “MoneyChimp seeks to be the most coherent, logical, useful and accessible financial education resource on the face of the earth.” [...]

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Duncan Hood writes, “Steal this column,” in Canadian Business Online. He refers to a research paper that suggests copycat funds — that simply mimic mutual funds at each public disclosure (funds have to release their holdings at least semi-annually) — can yield similar returns to the mutual funds they copy, and, in the [...]

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I’m posting this as a follow-up to a previous post about a newspaper ad for an index-linked GIC product. Rob Carrick at the Globe and Mail (June 9, 2007) writes, There’s a price to pay for investment guarantees, about principal protected notes (PPNs) and index-linked guaranteed investment certificates (GICs).
His conclusion: “Once you know the [...]

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