Meb Faber Research – Stock Market and Investing Blog

“When the facts change, I change my mind – what do you do, sir?" - J.M. KeynesI relish the freedom in being able to change my mind (some would say to a fault). One huge problem in any profession is vested interests. WisdomTree, for example, has built their entire business around dividends. When confronted with a...

Red Herring reports that the owner of pharmacy.com is looking to fetch $50M for his domain. Wow. Then again, business.com went for $350M. . .Seeing as Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, IndexIQ, Stonebrook Structured Products, State Street Global Advisors, and Deutsche Bank AG are ALL launching hedge fund clones, don't you think one of them...

Here is a great PDF from James Montier (Global Equity Strategy at Dresdner) describing his favorite investment books. I picked up a couple I had never heard of for some end of Summer beach reading. . .The Robot's Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin Psychology of Intelligence Analysis

A recent article in the WSJ, "Why Harvard is Smarting", takes a look at a hedge fund investment gone bad. I have blogged numerous times on the outstanding track records of the top university endowments, Harvard and Yale. (You may also want to check out a similar previous post on comparing a simple asset allocation to the hedge...

Let's exclude all the historical data that would impact our strategy the most negatively, that way we can peddle the system on an unsuspecting public. BRILLIANT!A spokesman from the CBOE sent me this note in response to why the CBOE didn't include pre-1988 results in their option selling indices. I disagree completely of course (especially with the...

A recent article in BusinessWeek highlights a topic readers of World Beta have been privy to for some time - that following the top investors can lead to abnormal returns. Another paper, "The Investment Value of Mutual Fund Portfolio Disclosure",tackles the subject.ABSTRACTThis paper uses disclosed mutual fund portfolio holdings to develop stock selection models. Our models aggregate portfolio...

I REALLY like this paper. Looking for extra information at the extremes makes more sense to me than just decile stats. Here is the AlphaLetters Journal review, and if you would like more in-depth analysis, check out the always thorough CXO Advisory. The author's website can be found at Improving the P/E Ratio.Category: Value, Extreme value...

I'm a big fan of Marc Faber, and not just because we share a great surname. I especially enjoy reading his Barron's roundatable interviews - he always seems to have quirky picks that are usually spot on (sometimes spectacularly so). Seriously, how many other market gurus do you know that have a lifestyle tab on their webpage?One...

One of the most popular technical patterns that chartists follow is the head and shoulders pattern. The definition from Investopedia:1. Rises to a peak and subsequently declines.2. Then, the price rises above the former peak and again declines.3. And finally, rises again, but not to the second peak, and declines once more.The first and third peaks are shoulders,...

When I moved to California after graduation, I spent some time mulling my options with job prospects. I had just wrapped up my first job in DC as a biotech equity analyst while taking grad classes at Hopkins, and was considering jobs in both the investment and biotech industries (SF is a great locale for both). One...