Meb Faber Research – Stock Market and Investing Blog

Off recent highs, but still pretty steep:

“What do you wish you’d known about the process of writing a book that you didn’t know before you did it?” Fun article for my writer friends that looks at advice from 23 published authors on the process of writing a book. And to see just how much the world has changed, a little clip on book making.  Some cool advice: Be...

From Myhrvold at Bloomy: None of these catastrophes came entirely out of the blue. To the contrary, geologic history tells us that we’ve actually gotten off lucky. In 1783, the Laki volcano in Iceland erupted so violently that it killed perhaps a quarter of the country’s population. That volcano put enough ash into the sky to change the weather in the...

There is news out recently that Bill Ackman wants to launch a public fund.  We've been writing about Ackman for years including a 2007 piece entitled "Will Someone Please List a Hedge Fund in the US?" when we used to talk about the foreign listed hedge funds. It is too bad he is considering launching a closed-end fund however as...

Congrats to everyone at my favorite institutional research shop on the recent news to be acquired by Euromoney.  Lets hope nothing changes and the fantastic research continues!  

From Forbes magazine: "In July Universa intends to tap the financial adviser market by offering its own black swan ETF. The fund will mimic some of the strategies employed by its institutional-only hedge fund and will have an expense ratio of 1.5%." We considered launching a basket of puts as a tradeable ETF.  I think investors would welcome the ability to...

I'm finally ready to start cranking out these papers and my goal is to get out six more by year end.  I am also experimenting with longer form analysis on the blog and will post this article here once I can clean it up.  Let me know what you think! You can download the whole white paper below on SSRN...

I'm doing an IndexUniverse webinar tomorrow, swing by and come ask some questions! 6/14/2011 2PM Eastern

This is an interesting note from Morningstar on how their analysts are going to start rating funds including qualitative measures: The new ratings, which will include single-A to triple A on the positive end, neutral and negative, will start showing up on about 200 funds this fall. Over the next 12 months, Mr. Phillips expects the ratings to be applied...

Mark Hulbert takes a look at trendfollowing in his recent article Making the Trend Your Friend. In the post he backtests the 200-day SMA back to the late 1800's and finds that it beats buy and hold.  (Although he does not mention the reduction in volatility and drawdown which are the two main benefits of a moving average strategy...