Meb Faber Research – Stock Market and Investing Blog

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I'll start publishing this weekly instead of monthly...here's the first!    

When was the last time you had an idea that resulted in the threat of your torture? In the early 1600s, Galileo was expanding upon Copernicus’ idea that the earth revolves around the sun. The easy-going church was slightly less than enthused. In short, things escalated… The Pope got involved… There was a trial… The threat of torture… Eventually, Galileo was found...

Two fun endnotes from a recent Arnott article: 1.  Active managers have failed to deliver on clients’ return expectations through no fault of their own. This result is almost a tautology. When the capitalization-weighted index strategies are removed from the cap-weighted market, we’re left with more or less the same portfolio, that is, the holdings of active managers and individual...

Last week I polled my Twitter followers, and as a result we're moving the "Best Tweets" feature from monthly to weekly.  It may end up as its own tab or even app, not sure quite what to do with it.   Email in if you have any suggestions!  

One of the most fertile areas of research is in factor rotation.  Any asset class, investment strategy, or factor, despite working well over time, goes through periods of over and underperformance.  Those periods set the stage for future reversion, and are largely due to fund flows and people chasing performance. Lots of the fund flows over the past # of...

A question… When an overvalued security continues rising in price, does that mean the valuation indicator is broken? If you listen to many investors, the answer would be “yes.” An oft-repeated phrase I hear goes something like: “ABC valuation indicator has been flashing expensive since XX/XX date.  But the stock has gone up 900%!  Therefore, ABC value indicator is broken.” Is that conclusion fair? Today, let’s...

I started to fill out this table then quickly got bored.  So, I'll just include lots of links to PDFs of the source materials.  Returns in the table are REAL returns, after inflation.  GMO is the grumpiest, JPM the rosiest...Vanguard and Bridgewater are also expecting muted returns though I couldn't find any specific #s... Click to enlarge AQR JPM PIMCO Suisse UBS Sellwood      

Ask any mutual fund manager why you should invest with them, and you’ll likely find yourself met with a barrage of sales points, all of which will underscore one takeaway—their fund deserves lots of your money. So why then do over 8,000 mutual fund managers have less than $100k invested in their own funds? I think it’s important that I have...

I am currently updating The Idea Farm backtester, which lets you test any buy and hold allocation back to the 1970s, now across over 37 assets.  There is also the ability to test basic relative strength and trendfollowing strategies. I've updated it through 2015, and thought about likewise updating the GAA book.  I've included all of the sample allocations in...