“
It’s not possible for investors to consistently outperform the market. Therefore you’re best served investing in a diversified portfolio of low-cost index funds [or exchange-traded funds].
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Charles T. Munger
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Permaculture Capital Stewardship, or Permaculture Investing, is about not just having a diversified portfolio, but having a portfolio where all of the assets within the portfolio have synergy and whereby that synergy is channeled toward maximized productivity for both shareholders and stakeholders. A permaculture investment portfolio has a multiplicative value effect.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
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The rise and fall of Teresa Cornelys proves three things: that the wages of sin are high, that you should “just say no” to opera, and that it’s always wise to diversify your investment portfolio.
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Ben Aaronovitch (Moon Over Soho (Rivers of London #2))
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The simplest approach to diversifying your stock market investments is to invest in one index fund that represents the entire stock market.
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Bill Schultheis (The Coffeehouse Investor: How to Build Wealth, Ignore Wall Street, and Get On with Your Life)
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It is a common misconception that if you diversify, you don’t need to learn anything. Just buy a bunch of stocks, and you will be good. Nothing can be further from the truth.
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Naved Abdali
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Your first investment should be in yourself. Learn new skills. The market can go up or down but you’ll never lose your skills. This is more true today than ever before. Diversify your skills.
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Salil Jha
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Similarly, the buy-and-hold investor who prudently holds a diversified portfolio of low-cost index funds through thick and thin is the investor most likely to achieve her long-term investment goals.
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Burton G. Malkiel (The Elements of Investing: Easy Lessons for Every Investor)
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After each video of a police killing goes viral, popular reforms go on tour: banning chokeholds, investing in community policing, diversifying departments—none of which would have saved Floyd or most other police victims.
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Derecka Purnell (Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom)
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Investment Owner’s Contract I, _____________ ___________________, hereby state that I am an investor who is seeking to accumulate wealth for many years into the future. I know that there will be many times when I will be tempted to invest in stocks or bonds because they have gone (or “are going”) up in price, and other times when I will be tempted to sell my investments because they have gone (or “are going”) down. I hereby declare my refusal to let a herd of strangers make my financial decisions for me. I further make a solemn commitment never to invest because the stock market has gone up, and never to sell because it has gone down. Instead, I will invest $______.00 per month, every month, through an automatic investment plan or “dollar-cost averaging program,” into the following mutual fund(s) or diversified portfolio(s): _________________________________, _________________________________, _________________________________. I will also invest additional amounts whenever I can afford to spare the cash (and can afford to lose it in the short run). I hereby declare that I will hold each of these investments continually through at least the following date (which must be a minimum of 10 years after the date of this contact): _________________ _____, 20__. The only exceptions allowed under the terms of this contract are a sudden, pressing need for cash, like a health-care emergency or the loss of my job, or a planned expenditure like a housing down payment or a tuition bill. I am, by signing below, stating my intention not only to abide by the terms of this contract, but to re-read this document whenever I am tempted to sell any of my investments. This contract is valid only when signed by at least one witness, and must be kept in a safe place that is easily accessible for future reference.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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If you buy an S&P 500 index fund, your investment is highly diversified and its performance will match that of 500 leading U.S. corporations' stocks. Is it possible to lose all of your money? Yes, but the odds of that happening are slim and none. If 500 leading U.S. corporations all have their stock prices plummet to zero, the value of your investment portfolio will be the least of your problems. An economic collapse of that magnitude would make the Great Depression look like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.
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Taylor Larimore (The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing)
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Think about this for a second. Why is it that we would not invest even a single dollar without diversifying it and managing risk, but do exactly the opposite, putting all of our eggs in one basket, with our regular income in our careers?" - Chris Lutz, Modular Career Design
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Chris Lutz
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The economic system pressures me to expand and diversify my investment portfolio, but it gives me zero incentive to expand and diversify my compassion. So I strive to understand the mysteries of the stock exchange while making far less effort to understand the deep causes of suffering.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
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Our society considers a man careless if he does not have a backup plan or an alternative escape route, if he has not diversified his investments, if he has put all his eggs in the same basket, or if he has burned bridges behind him. Yet this is the very thing that the man who receives Jesus Christ must do.
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Paul David Washer (The Gospel's Power & Message)
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Whenever anyone asks me for investment advice, I tell them to buy a diversified portfolio heavily tilted toward stocks, especially if they are young, and then scrupulously avoid reading anything in the newspaper aside from the sports section. Crossword puzzles are acceptable, but watching cable financial news networks is strictly forbidden.#
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Richard H. Thaler (Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics)
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We are researching and developing human abilities mainly according to the immediate needs of the economic and political system, rather than according to our own long-term needs as conscious beings. My boss wants me to answer emails as quickly as possible, but he has little interest in my ability to taste and appreciate the food I am eating. Consequently, I check my emails even during meals, which means I lose the ability to pay attention to my own sensations. The economic system pressures me to expand and diversify my investment portfolio, but it gives me zero incentive to expand and diversify my compassion. So I strive to understand the mysteries of the stock exchange while making far less effort to understand the deep causes of suffering.
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
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The purpose of diversification is so that when one investment goes down or is not doing well, you are insulated from the result because of the others you have in place. In a job or career, most of us are trying to specialize so much so that we've ended up with all of our eggs in the same basket. That's not managing risk at all. That's putting yourself at risk." - Chris Lutz
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Chris Lutz
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What’s going on there?” THAT’S JUST SOME REAL ESTATE DEALS I’M WORKING ON. “Real estate?” I HAVE A LIFE OUTSIDE OF THIS COMPANY, YOU KNOW. “More than I do,” I said. “Is … that legal? Owning real estate?” YOU MEAN, BECAUSE I’M A CAT? “Well, yes.” I HAVE A TRUST SET UP FOR MY BENEFIT AND A HUMAN LAWYER THAT ACTS AS THE EXECUTOR. I TELL HIM WHAT TO DO, HE DOES IT. “Does he know you’re a cat?” YOU KNOW, IT’S NEVER COME UP. “So, you’re a real estate maven.” I HAVE A DIVERSIFIED PORTFOLIO, Hera wrote. MOSTLY BORING BUT SOME EXCITING PARTS. I DO A LOT OF INVESTING IN EMERGING MARKETS. “Sounds risky.” I’M A CAT, I CAN HANDLE RISK. WORST-CASE SCENARIO IS I LOSE EVERYTHING AND I STILL GET FED AND HAVE A PLACE TO NAP. “That’s … a surprisingly chill way of thinking about things.” SOMETIMES IT’S BETTER NOT TO BE A HUMAN, CHARLIE.
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John Scalzi (Starter Villain)
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Most obviously, they agreed, an autocatalytic set was a web of transformations among molecules in precisely the same way that an economy is a web of transformations among goods and services. In a very real sense, in fact, an autocatalytic set was an economy—a submicroscopic economy that extracted raw materials (the primordial “food” molecules) and converted them into useful products (more molecules in the set). Moreover, an autocatalytic set can bootstrap its own evolution in precisely the same way that an economy can, by growing more and more complex over time. This was a point that fascinated Kauffman. If innovations result from new combinations of old technologies, then the number of possible innovations would go up very rapidly as more and more technologies became available. In fact, he argued, once you get beyond a certain threshold of complexity you can expect a kind of phase transition analogous to the ones he had found in his autocatalytic sets. Below that level of complexity you would find countries dependent upon just a few major industries, and their economies would tend to be fragile and stagnant. In that case, it wouldn’t matter how much investment got poured into the country. “If all you do is produce bananas, nothing will happen except that you produce more bananas.” But if a country ever managed to diversify and increase its complexity above the critical point, then you would expect it to undergo an explosive increase in growth and innovation—what some economists have called an “economic takeoff.
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M. Mitchell Waldrop (Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos)
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The 12 Principles of Permaculture Investing are:
1. Accumulate & Compound Capital: Consistently save and invest to grow your capital base over time, leveraging the power of compound interest.
2. Utilize Capital: Actively deploy your capital into productive investments that generate returns, rather than letting it sit idle.
3. Retain Maximum & Gradiented Liquidity: Maintain a balance between liquid assets (easily accessible cash) and less liquid investments, ensuring you can meet immediate needs while still investing for the long term.
4. Actively Manage Passive: While focusing on passive income sources, actively monitor and adjust your investments to optimize returns and mitigate risks.
5. Prioritize Long-Term Growth: Focus on investments that offer potential for significant growth over the long term, even if they don't provide immediate high yields.
6. Prioritize Consistent Yields: Balance your portfolio with investments that provide reliable, consistent income to support your financial needs.
7. Add Net Value to all Stakeholders: Invest in ways that benefit not only yourself but also the broader community, environment, and all parties involved.
8. Provide Authentic Data: Be transparent and honest in your financial reporting, providing accurate information to all stakeholders.
9. Collect & Utilize Authentic Data: Base your investment decisions on reliable, verified data rather than speculation or rumors.
10. Diversify Holistically: Diversify your investments across different asset classes, industries, and geographical regions to reduce risk and maximize potential returns.
11. Harvest Yields Equitably: Distribute profits fairly among all stakeholders, ensuring everyone benefits from the investment's success.
12. Reinvest Yields in Most Profitable Assets: Continuously evaluate your portfolio and reinvest profits into the most promising opportunities to further compound your growth.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
Most obviously, they agreed, an autocatalytic set was a web of transformations among molecules in precisely the same way that an economy is a web of transformations among goods and services. In a very real sense, in fact, an autocatalytic set was an economy-a submicroscopic economy that extracted raw materials (the primordial "food" molecules) and converted them into useful products (more molecules in the set).
Moreover an autocatalytic set can bootstrap its own evolution in precisely the same way that an economy can, by growing more and more complex over time. This was a point that fascinated Kauffman. If innovations result from new combinations of old technologies, then the number of possible innovations would go up very rapidly as more and more technologies became available. In fact, he argued, once you get beyond a certain threshold of complexity you can expect a kind of phase transition analogous to the ones he had found in his autocatalytic sets. Below that level of complexity you would find countries dependent upon just a few major industries, and their economies would tend to be fragile and stagnant. In that case, it wouldn't matter how much investment got poured into the country. "If all you do is produce bananas, nothing will happen except that you produce more bananas." But if a country ever managed to diversify and increase its complexity above the critical point, then you would expect it to undergo an explosive increase in growth and innovation-what some economists have called an "economic takeoff."
The existence of that phase transition would also help explain why trade is so important to prosperity, Kauffman told Arthur. Suppose you have two different countries, each one of which is subcritical by itself. Their economies are going nowhere. But now suppose they start trading, so that their economies become interlinked into one large economy with a higher complexity. "I expect that trade between such systems will allow the joint system to become supercritical and explode outward."
Finally, an autocatalytic set can undergo exactly the same kinds of evolutionary booms and crashes that an economy does. Injecting one new kind of molecule into the soup could often transform the set utterly, in much the same way that the economy transformed when the horse was replaced by the automobile. This was part of autocatalysis that really captivated Arthur. It had the same qualities that had so fascinated him when he first read about molecular biology: upheaval and change and enormous consequences flowing from trivial-seeming events-and yet with deep law hidden beneath.
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M. Mitchell Waldrop (Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos)
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Diversifying across many investments that are dissimilar and rebalancing those investments to their original target at the end of the year can reduce the annual volatility of the portfolio over time by enough to increase the compounded return. This “free lunch” from rebalancing is the essence of modern portfolio theory.
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Richard A. Ferri (All About Asset Allocation)
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The tools of traditional finance, like modern portfolio theory, can help investors establish efficient portfolios to maximize their wealth with acceptable levels of risk. However, mental accounting makes it difficult to implement these tools. Instead, investors use mental accounting to match different investing goals to different asset allocations. This often leads to investors diversifying their portfolios by goal rather than in total. When investors pick investments in each goal-focused mini portfolio, they examine each choice’s individual risk and return characteristics and ignore their diversification characteristics. They eliminate the choices they view as inferior and then often simply divide their money equally among the acceptable choices.
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John R. Nofsinger (The Psychology of Investing)
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I’m speaking here about the classic index fund, one that is broadly diversified, holding all (or almost all) of its share of the $15 trillion capitalization of the U.S. stock market, operating with minimal expenses and without advisory fees, with tiny portfolio turnover, and with high tax efficiency. The index fund simply owns corporate America, buying an interest in each stock in the stock market in proportion to its market capitalization and then holding it forever.
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John C. Bogle (The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns (Little Books. Big Profits 21))
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diversify your investments, etc.
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Jigar Patel (NRI Investments and Taxation: A Small Guide for Big Gains)
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We favor familiar investments. This might include shares of our employer, companies that compete in the industry where we work, corporations that are headquartered near our home and companies whose products we use. The familiarity makes these stocks more comfortable to own, but the result is often a badly diversified portfolio with a lot of unnecessary risk.
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Jonathan Clements (How to Think About Money)
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The interregional slave trade guaranteed a source of slaves to slave owners, who “hitched their future to slavery a single cash crop and fresh land” and refused to take an interest in manufacturing or diversifying agricultural production.25 The price of slaves tripled between 1800 and 1860, making human property the most lucrative investment. The price of a “prime male f ield hand in New Orleans began at around $500 in 1800 and rose as high as $1,800 by the time of the Civil War.”26 The result was that slave owners and investors who benefited from the interregional slave trade had a vested interest in its expansion.
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Steven Dundas
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In Money: Master the Game, Ray Dalio elaborated for Tony: “When people think they’ve got a balanced portfolio, stocks are three times more volatile than bonds. So when you’re 50/50, you’re really 90/10. You really are massively at risk, and that’s why when the markets go down, you get eaten alive. . . . Whatever asset class you invest in, I promise you, in your lifetime, it will drop no less than 50% and more likely 70% at some point. That is why you absolutely must diversify.
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Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
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As a personal finance advisor, you will provide guidance on how to manage money more effectively. Take into account techniques such as budgeting, setting financial goals, diversifying investments, and understanding credit. Offer advice about building wealth over time and discuss the importance of creating a plan for achieving long-term financial security. My first request is “What should I do to improve my financial situation?
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Neil Dagger (The ChatGPT Millionaire (Chat GPT Mastery))
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Pro-risk, aggressive investors, for example, should be expected to make more than the index in good times and lose more in bad times. This is where beta comes in. By the word beta, theory means relative volatility, or the relative responsiveness of the portfolio return to the market return. A portfolio with a beta above 1 is expected to be more volatile than the reference market, and a beta below 1 means it’ll be less volatile. Multiply the market return by the beta and you’ll get the return that a given portfolio should be expected to achieve, omitting nonsystematic sources of risk. If the market is up 15 percent, a portfolio with a beta of 1.2 should return 18 percent (plus or minus alpha). Theory looks at this information and says the increased return is explained by the increase in beta, or systematic risk. It also says returns don’t increase to compensate for risk other than systematic risk. Why don’t they? According to theory, the risk that markets compensate for is the risk that is intrinsic and inescapable in investing: systematic or “non-diversifiable” risk. The rest of risk comes from decisions to hold individual stocks: non-systematic risk. Since that risk can be eliminated by diversifying, why should investors be compensated with additional return for bearing it? According to theory, then, the formula for explaining portfolio performance (y) is as follows: y = α + βx Here α is the symbol for alpha, β stands for beta, and x is the return of the market. The market-related return of the portfolio is equal to its beta times the market return, and alpha (skill-related return) is added to arrive at the total return (of course, theory says there’s no such thing as alpha). Although I dismiss the identity between risk and volatility, I insist on considering a portfolio’s return in the light of its overall riskiness, as discussed earlier. A manager who earned 18 percent with a risky portfolio isn’t necessarily superior to one who earned 15 percent with a lower-risk portfolio. Risk-adjusted return holds the key, even though—since risk other than volatility can’t be quantified—I feel it is best assessed judgmentally, not calculated scientifically.
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Howard Marks (The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor (Columbia Business School Publishing))
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a tool that enabled him to engage in a “patriotic duty to develop vital resources.” And in fairness, there was policy rationale in encouraging capital investment in the American steel industry, with the hope that the nation would develop the competency. Such policies were successful in diversifying and growing the industrial base: America did emerge as the largest steel producer in the world by the end of the century. From here the growth of the American steel industry paved the way for a variety of ancillary and dependent industries over the next few decades. Even military might in the next century would be firmly rooted in steelmaking capacity. But laissez-faire capitalism it was not. The invisible hand of Adam Smith’s free market was accompanied by the guiding hand of government policy.
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Bhu Srinivasan (Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism)
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Plan B/Second Citizenship Without going into a long and boring economic analysis, first world countries have a sundry amount of structural problems that may make living and working in them no longer tenable. And while it may be a tedious chore on par with creating a will or doing your taxes, it would pay for every man today to diversify into another country. This can be in the form of attaining a second citizenship, gaining permanent residency in another country, or simply having a piece of property overseas. But the larger point is to be able to survive and maintain your standard of living in the case your home country collapses or simply becomes too hostile. People will mock and scoff at this, thinking you're crazy. And hopefully they're right. Hopefully, you're just a crazy libertarian who reads too many economic reports and you're overly pessimistic. But keep in mind these are the same people who said “housing only goes up” and that “dotcoms are the future” and that “any degree is a good degree” and “inflation is transitory.” They are also the same people who said, “the Titanic can't sink!” and foolishly think their marriages will last until “death do them part.” Be wise. Invest the time in building a metaphorical life raft just in case the Titanic does sink. You don't have to mention it to people, and to avoid ridicule you shouldn't. But quietly investigate your genealogy, find out if you can get citizenship elsewhere, travel overseas, and make sure you have a sovereign life raft.
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Aaron Clarey (The Menu: Life Without the Opposite Sex)
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In the conclusion to his letter to the Post’s owner, Buffett therefore laid out his recommendations: Either stay the course with a bunch of big, mainstream professional fund managers and accept that the newspaper’s pension fund would likely do slightly worse than the market; find smaller, specialized investment managers who were more likely to be able to beat the market; or simply build a broad, diversified portfolio of stocks that mirrored the entire market. Buffett obliquely noted that “several funds have been established fairly recently to duplicate the averages, quite explicitly embodying the principle that no management is cheaper, and slightly better than average paid management after transaction costs.
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Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)
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TWO AND A HALF CENTURIES AGO, Amsterdam was the world’s commercial center, but many of its wealthy merchants were reeling from one of the world’s first financial crises. The shares of the British East India Company had collapsed, culminating in a series of bank failures, government bailouts, and ultimately nationalization, a debacle that rippled across the continent’s nascent markets. For a little-known Dutch merchant and stockbroker, it proved the inspiration for an idea ahead of its time. In 1774, Abraham von Ketwich set up a novel, pooled investment trust he called Eendragt Maakt Magt—Dutch for “Unity Creates Strength.” This would sell two thousand shares for five hundred guilders each to individual investors, and invest the proceeds into a diversified portfolio of fifty bonds. These were divided into ten different categories, from plantation loans, bonds backed by Spanish or Danish toll road payments, to an assortment of European government bonds. At the time, bonds were physical certificates written on paper or even goatskin, and these were stored in a solid iron chest with three locks, which could be opened only by Eendragt Maakt Magt’s board and an independent notary. The aim was to pay a 4 percent annual dividend, and disburse the final proceeds only after twenty-five years, hoping that the diversity of the portfolio would protect investors.1 As it turns out, a subsequent Anglo-Dutch war in 1780 and Napoleon’s occupation of Holland in 1795 wreaked havoc on Eendragt Maakt Magt. The annual payments never materialized, and investors didn’t receive their money back until 1824, albeit then receiving 561 guilders a share. Nonetheless, Eendragt Maakt Magt was a brilliant invention that would go on to inspire the birth of investment trusts in Great Britain and eventually the mutual fund we know today. It is also arguably the ultimate intellectual forefather of today’s index funds, given its minimal trading, diversified approach, and low fees, charging a mere 0.2 percent a year.
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Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)
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The investment was approximately 14.3% of the Partnership’s assets when he wrote to Howard Clark in June 1964. But Buffett kept buying the stock as the salad oil scandal receded from the limelight. By November, he owned approximately 90,000 shares, up from the 70,000 in June. Buffett kept buying the stock into 1966, more than tripling his stake in the company: He scooped up more than 5% of American Express’s shares, up from the 1.6% stake when he wrote to Howard Clark in 1964.277 The position became such a significant percentage of the portfolio that Buffett amended his ‘Ground Rules’ to partners in November 1965, adding a seventh rule: We diversify substantially less than most investment operations. We might invest up to 40% of our net worth in a single security under conditions coupling an extremely high probability that our facts and reasoning are correct with a very low probability that anything could drastically change the underlying value of the investment.278 American Express was the Partnership’s largest investment at the end of 1965 and 1966, and it crushed the market in each of 1964, 1965, and 1966.279 The salad oil scandal was considered over by the end of 1964 despite negotiations still ongoing; the major claims wouldn’t settle until 1967, with some minor suits outside the main case lasting until the 1970s.280,281 Table 2 shows that revenue and income exploded as the Partnership added to its stake.
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Brett Gardner (Buffett's Early Investments: A new investigation into the decades when Warren Buffett earned his best returns)
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1. Keep speculation and investments separate.
2. Don't be fooled by a name.
3. Be wary of new promotions.
4. Give due consideration to market ability.
5. Don't buy without proper facts.
6. Safeguard purchases through diversification.
7. Don't try to diversify by buying different securities of the same company.
8. Small companies should be carefully scrutinized.
9. Buy adequate security, not super abundance.
10. Choose your dealer and buy outright. (Babson abhorred any type of margin or installment payment plans and, in fact, claimed he never borrowed money.)
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Kenneth L. Fisher (100 Minds That Made the Market (Fisher Investments Press Book 23))
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Efforts to promote a sustainable use of natural resources are not a waste of money, but rather an investment capable of providing other economic benefits in the medium term. If we look at the larger picture, we can see that more diversified and innovative forms of production which impact less on the environment can prove very profitable.
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Pope Francis
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Opportunities for growth maximize the benefits derived from high returns on capital. Such opportunities can arise from market growth, either cyclical or structural, or through a firm grabbing share from rivals in existing markets or expanding geographically. The very best companies enjoy a diversified set of growth drivers through ingenuity in the design of products, pricing, and product mix.
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Lawrence A. Cunningham (Quality Investing: Owning the Best Companies for the Long Term)
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There are less than a handful of principles that, if mastered, get you 95+% of the way to an optimal portfolio: stay diversified, keep expenses low, have a plan, save and invest early and often.
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Alex Frey (A Beginner's Guide to Investing: How to Grow Your Money the Smart and Easy Way)
“
The means Carey initiated for global outreach, the mission society, is a core strategy for Baptists around the world. Much good has come from using this method, but perhaps at the expense of keeping all believers in local churches lashed to the burden of global mission responsibility. The proliferation of mission societies on every continent, in almost every country and for every conceivable purpose, has diversified missionary outreach. It has also, perhaps to the detriment of Baptist churches, diluted efforts by expending so much money on administration, promotion, fundraising, and management of thousands of well-meaning organizations, rather than investing more resources directly in the field.
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Allen Yen (Expect Great Things, Attempt Great Things: William Carey and Adoniram Judson, Missionary Pioneers (Studies in World Christianity))
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Creating a huge personal fortune was never particularly a goal of mine, and the proof of that lies in the fact that even to this day most of my, and my family’s, wealth remains in the form of Wal-Mart stock. I think most people in our position would have hedged their bets a long time ago and diversified into all kinds of investments. As it’s happened, though, our very simplistic, very personal investment strategy has turned out far better than anyone could ever have expected. So Wal-Mart stock has made the Waltons a very wealthy family—on paper anyway. I
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Sam Walton (Sam Walton: Made In America)
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The beauty and permanence of marriage is investing in a rich and diversified preambles followed by observational life, interpretational life, emotional life and revelational life.
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JOEL NYARANGI AKOYA
“
Following the evidence, I concluded that individuals fare best by constructing equity-oriented, broadly diversified portfolios without the active management component. Instead of pursuing ephemeral promises of market-beating strategies, individuals benefit from adopting the ironclad reality of market-mimicking portfolios managed by not-for-profit investment organizations. The
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David F. Swensen (Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment)
“
The best choice for your equity investments is a fund indexed to the total world stock market. If you are truly uncomfortable investing in “foreign” stocks, you could choose a domestic total stock market fund. We recommend that you be diversified internationally because the United States represents less than half of the world’s economic activity and stock market capitalization. For your bonds, choose a total U.S. bond market index fund.
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Burton G. Malkiel (The Elements of Investing: Easy Lessons for Every Investor)
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Diversifying your investments allows you to earn greater returns without taking on more risk, or equivalently to take less risk without sacrificing any returns.
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Alex Frey (A Beginner's Guide to Investing: How to Grow Your Money the Smart and Easy Way)
“
Over the 210 years I have examined stock returns, the real return on a broadly diversified portfolio of stocks has averaged 6.6 percent per year.
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Jeremy J. Siegel (Stocks for the Long Run: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies)
“
Often, they mindlessly repeat what they have been told. Ideas such as “diversify” or “your home is an asset.” “Your home is your biggest investment.” “You get a tax break for going into greater debt.” “Get a safe job.” “Don’t make mistakes.” “Don’t take risks.
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Robert T. Kiyosaki (Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not)
“
stay diversified, keep expenses low, have a plan, save and invest early and often.
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Alex Frey (A Beginner's Guide to Investing: How to Grow Your Money the Smart and Easy Way)
“
Jenny smiled a bit wistfully. It had been almost a year since her mother had been killed and a lot had changed. She had moved into Asher’s house, giving up her apartment. After Asher’s elevation to Vice-President, he had slowly taken on more and more responsibility for running the club. With investments from the Bucs and the Trifectas, the HDs had been expanding. They dominated the strip club and escort business in Miami, and had expanded aggressively into Boca Raton, Fort Lauderdale, and had just completed a deal to buy six clubs in Tampa. They were also starting an x-rated video production company to further diversify their income stream. While they may never rub elbows with respectable bankers and real estate barons, the HDs were now a fully legal operation.
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Kathryn Thomas (Asher (Heartless Devils MC))
“
Low investment amount: One can start with as low as Rs. 1000 and get the advantage of investing in a diversified equity portfolio.
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Jigar Patel (NRI Investments and Taxation: A Small Guide for Big Gains)
“
Low cost: Investment in a direct plan of a big diversified equity mutual fund would cost only 1.30% per year (expense ratio of about 1.9% and saving by direct option of about 0.6%)
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Jigar Patel (NRI Investments and Taxation: A Small Guide for Big Gains)
“
Diversify across securities, across asset classes, across markets—and across time.
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Burton G. Malkiel (The Elements of Investing: Easy Lessons for Every Investor)
“
One asset class that belongs in most portfolios is bonds. Bonds are basically IOUs issued by corporations and government units. (The government units might be foreign, state and local, or government-sponsored enterprises such as the Federal National Mortgage Association, popularly known as Fannie Mae.) And just as you should diversify by holding a broadly diversified stock fund, so should you hold a broadly diversified bond fund.
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Burton G. Malkiel (The Elements of Investing: Easy Lessons for Every Investor)
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Unlike common stocks, whose dividends and earnings fluctuate with the ups and downs of the company’s business, bonds pay a fixed dollar amount of interest. If the U.S. Treasury offers a $1,000 20-year, 5 percent bond, that bond will pay $50 per year until it matures, when the principal will be repaid. Corporate bonds are less safe, but widely diversified bond portfolios have provided reasonably stable interest returns over time.
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Burton G. Malkiel (The Elements of Investing: Easy Lessons for Every Investor)
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Does achieving extremely broad diversification seem completely out of reach for ordinary investors? Fear not. There are broadly invested, very low-cost funds that can provide one-stop shopping solutions. We will recommend a broadly diversified United States total stock market index fund that includes real estate companies and commodity producers, including gold miners. We
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Burton G. Malkiel (The Elements of Investing: Easy Lessons for Every Investor)
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You should diversify over time. Don’t make all your investments at a single time. If
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Burton G. Malkiel (The Elements of Investing: Easy Lessons for Every Investor)
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Paul Samuelson, first American to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Science: "The most efficient way to diversify a stock portfolio is with a low fee index fund. Statistically, a broadly based stock index fund will outperform most actively managed equity portfolios.
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Taylor Larimore (The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing)
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Protect yourself: Every investor should always diversify.
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Burton G. Malkiel (The Elements of Investing: Easy Lessons for Every Investor)
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What does diversification mean in practice? It means that when you invest in the stock market, you want a broadly diversified portfolio holding hundreds of stocks. For people of modest means, and even quite wealthy people, the way to accomplish that is to buy one or more low-cost equity index mutual funds. The fund pools the money from thousands of investors and buys a portfolio of hundreds of individual common stocks. The mutual fund collects all the dividends, does all the accounting, and lets mutual fund owners reinvest all cash distributions in more shares of the fund if they so wish.
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Burton G. Malkiel (The Elements of Investing: Easy Lessons for Every Investor)
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J. Avilla & Company buys houses by offering cash and don't rely on bank for financial transaction. We pay cash while performing financial transaction to avoid the trouble with payment
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J. Avila & Company Diversified Real Estate Investment Firm
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What are simple, transparent strategies for investing your money? Here are some examples if you want to play it safe. One third in stocks, one third in bonds, one third in real estate. This is the 1/N rule that we met before. Here, it means allocating your money equally between stocks, bonds, and real estate. Save 20 percent, spend 80 percent. Saving does not mean hiding money under your pillow, but rather investing it in the future. Diversify as broadly as you can—far more than experts tell you.21
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Anonymous
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Three simple rules - pay less, diversify more and be contrarian - will serve almost everyone well.
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John Kay (The Long and the Short of It - Finance and Investment for Normally Intelligent People Who Are Not in)
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When it comes to investing, you can control a few levers. Find a fiduciary platform so you're in a safe space. Invest for the long run, diversify broadly, use low-fee investments, use tax-efficient investments, and stick to a proven strategy. Look for the balanced approach, in investing and in the way you spend your time and money.
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Elizabeth MacBride (The Little Book of Robo Investing: How to Make Money While You Sleep (Little Books. Big Profits))
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Much as an investor benefits from diversifying their investments, we, too, benefit from diversifying our sources of identity and meaning. Meaning is not something that is bestowed upon us. It’s something we create. And as with any act of creation, it requires time and energy—the time to invest in nonwork pursuits and the energy to actually do so.
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Simone Stolzoff (The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work)
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It is curious that experts recommend that investments be broadly diversified, while at the same time recommending that job skills should be highly concentrated.
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Jacob Lund Fisker (Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence)
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Africa, I believe, is embarking upon an era of sharp divergences in which China will play a huge role in specific national outcomes—for better and for worse, perhaps even dramatically, depending on the country. Places endowed with stable governments, with elites that are accountable and responsive to the needs of their fellow citizens, and with relatively healthy institutions, will put themselves in a position to thrive on the strength of robust Chinese demand for their exports and fast-growing investment from China and from a range of other emerging economic powers, including Brazil, Turkey, India, and Vietnam. Inevitably, most of these African countries will be democracies. Other nations, whether venal dictatorships, states rendered dysfunctional by war, and even some fragile democracies—places where institutions remain too weak or corrupted—will sell off their mineral resources to China and other bidders, and squander what is in effect a one-time chance to convert underground riches into aboveground wealth by investing in their own citizens and creating new kinds of economic activity beyond today’s simple extraction. The proposition at work here couldn’t be more straightforward. The timeline for resource depletion in many African countries is running in tandem with the timeline for the continent’s unprecedented demographic explosion. At current rates, in the next forty years, most African states will have twice the number of people they count now. By that same time, their presently known reserves of minerals like iron, bauxite, copper, cobalt, uranium, gold, and more, will be largely depleted. Those who have diversified their economies and invested in their citizens, particularly in education and health, will have a shot at prosperity. Those that haven’t, stand to become hellish places, barely viable, if viable at all.
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Howard W. French (China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa)
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complement the first. The initial credit line Junior offered for investing in artists was only $100 million, much less than what had been available at Warner, but Morris could see that, sitting on a limitless tap of booze money, there was a lot more where that came from.4 Best of all, Seagram was domiciled in Canada, where the lyrics of popular rap songs were not a pressing political issue. Although Jimmy Iovine and Doug Morris were temporarily estranged as colleagues, they remained best friends and hoped to reunite. Fuchs’ actions had stung them both, and Iovine had raised such a stink after Morris’ sacking that he was no longer permitted in the Time Warner Building. Under normal circumstances, he too would have been fired, but Iovine didn’t actually work for Warner directly—he was an equity partner in a joint venture, and the only way to get rid of him was to sell him back his shares. This was an expensive proposition, as Interscope had diversified beyond rap, signing No Doubt, Nine Inch Nails, and Marilyn Manson. Together, the two came up with a plan. Iovine, the agitator, would make himself unbearable to Fuchs, and push extreme albums like Dogg Food and Antichrist Superstar that made the provocations of The Chronic seem boring by comparison. Morris,
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Stephen Witt (How Music Got Free: The incredible true story of the modern music revolution, now a major new documentary series)
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So much in our culture reinforces the idea that a relationship is everything, but just as it’s financially smart to have a diversified portfolio of investments, the more you strive to make as many aspects in your life as meaningful as possible, the more satisfied you’ll feel.
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Jenny Taitz (How to Be Single and Happy: Science-Based Strategies for Keeping Your Sanity While Looking for a Soul Mate)
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Instead, recognize that investing intelligently is about controlling the controllable. You can’t control whether the stocks or funds you buy will outper-forms the market today, next week, this month, or this year; in the short run, your returns will always be hostage to Mr. Market and his whims. But you can control: your brokerage costs, by trading rarely, patiently, and cheaply your ownership costs, by refusing to buy mutual funds with excessive annual expenses your expectations, by using realism, not fantasy, to forecast your returns7 your risk, by deciding how much of your total assets to put at hazard in the stock market, by diversifying, and by rebalancing your tax bills, by holding stocks for at least one year and, whenever possible, for at least five years, to lower your capital-gains liability and, most of all, your own behavior.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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People who believe in The Truth often read one book or a group of books all their lives. For them the last word has been uttered by, say, Thomas Aquinas or Adolf Hitler or Friedrich Nietzsche. Hence they stick to their particular Bible and wear it to shreds. Such readers are almost always psychopaths. A one-book man is a dangerous man and should be taken in hand and taught how to diversify his literary investments.
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Clifton Fadiman (Reading I've Liked)
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The most significant benefit of a diversified portfolio is psychological stability when you need it the most.
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Naved Abdali
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_____________ ___________________, hereby state that I am an investor who is seeking to accumulate wealth for many years into the future. I know that there will be many times when I will be tempted to invest in stocks or bonds because they have gone (or “are going”) up in price, and other times when I will be tempted to sell my investments because they have gone (or “are going”) down. I hereby declare my refusal to let a herd of strangers make my financial decisions for me. I further make a solemn commitment never to invest because the stock market has gone up, and never to sell because it has gone down. Instead, I will invest $______.00 per month, every month, through an automatic investment plan or “dollar-cost averaging program,” into the following mutual fund(s) or diversified portfolio(s): _________________________________, _________________________________, _________________________________. I will also invest additional amounts whenever I can afford to spare the cash (and can afford to lose it in the short run). I hereby declare that I will hold each of these investments continually through at least the following date (which must be a minimum of 10 years after the date of this contact): _________________ _____, 20__. The only exceptions allowed under the terms of this contract are a sudden, pressing need for cash, like a health-care emergency or the loss of my job, or a planned expenditure like a housing down payment or a tuition bill. I am, by signing below, stating my intention not only to abide by the terms of this contract, but to re-read this document whenever I am tempted to sell any of my investments. This contract is valid only when signed by at least one witness, and must be kept in a safe place that is easily accessible for future reference.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Simons’s team appeared to have discovered something of a holy grail in investing: enormous returns from a diversified portfolio generating relatively little volatility and correlation to the overall market. In the past, a few others had developed investment vehicles with similar characteristics. They usually had puny portfolios, however. No one had achieved what Simons and his team had—a portfolio as big as $5 billion delivering this kind of astonishing performance.
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Gregory Zuckerman (The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution)
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An Investor in Early Retirement Diversified domestic stocks 30% Diversified international stocks 10% Intermediate-term bonds 30% Inflation-Protected Securities 30% An Investor in Early Retirement Using Vanguard Funds Total Stock Market Index Fund 30% Total International Index Fund 10% Total Bond Market Index Fund 30% Inflation-Protected Securities 30%
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Mel Lindauer (The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing)
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Carl Hirschmann – Holden’s investment partner in the Mount Kenya Safari Club – was more than a Swiss banker as he was described in social registers. His diversified portfolio included machine tools, hotel industry, tourism, transportation, agriculture and real estate.
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Howard Johns (Drowning Sorrows: A True Story of Love, Passion and Betrayal)
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Real estate investment expert, Sief Khafagi is changing the game with short-term rentals. A former techie who worked at Facebook for five years building the second-largest engineering organization across the world, Sief is currently the Co-Founder and CEO of Techvestor. He and his team have helped thousands of investors diversify their portfolios to add real estate and benefit from the success of short-term rental investments. He led the company in building its proprietary sourcing technology.
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Sief Khafagi
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A major portion of the cost of defense against foreign aggression in a laissez-faire society would be borne originally by business and industry, as owners of industrial plants obviously have a much greater investment to defend than do owners of little houses in suburbia. If there were any real threat of aggression by a foreign power, businessmen would all be strongly motivated to buy insurance against that aggression, for the same reason that they buy fire insurance, even though they could save money in the short run by not doing so. An interesting result of this fact is that the cost of defense would ultimately tend to be spread among the whole population, since defense costs, along with overhead and other such costs, would have to be included in the prices paid for goods by consumers. So, the concern that “free riders” might get along without paying for their own defense by parasitically depending on the defenses paid for by their neighbors is groundless. It is based on a misconception of how the free-market system would operate. The role of business and industry as major consumers of foreign-aggression insurance would operate to unify the free area in the face of any aggression. An auto plant in Michigan, for example, might well have a vital source of raw materials in Montana, a parts plant in Ontario, a branch plant in California, warehouses in Texas, and outlets all over North America. Every one of these facilities is important to some degree to the management of that Michigan factory, so it will want to have them defended, each to the extent of its importance. Add to this the concern of the owners and managers of these facilities for their own businesses and for all the other businesses on which they, in turn, depend, and a vast, multiple network of interlocking defense systems emerges. The involvement of the insurance companies, with their diversified financial holdings and their far-flung markets would immeasurably strengthen this defensive network. Such a multiple network of interlocking defense systems is a far cry from the common but erroneous picture of small cities, businesses, and individuals, unprotected by a government, falling one by one before an advancing enemy horde.
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Morris Tannehill (Market for Liberty)
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Environmental influences almost invariably point investors down the path to investment failure. Advertisements flog stocks at equity market peaks, with nary a mention of diversifying fixed-income assets. After stocks suffer bear-market losses, the media tout the beneficial effects of owning bonds as an important part of a well-balanced portfolio. The overwhelming bulk of messages to investors suggest owning yesterday’s darling and avoiding yesterday’s goat.
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David F. Swensen (Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment)
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Stick to a simple, low-cost investing strategy. You should understand what you’re investing in. Find a single fund that’s already as diversified as possible, with the right amount of risk for your age. Vasbyt and stick to your plan, no matter what happens in the market. Don’t try to be clever: just add more money to your investment every month. Focus on reducing your costs, rather than on trying to beat the market.
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Sam Beckbessinger (Manage Your Money like a F*cking Grownup: The Best Money Advice You Never Got)
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Never invest a substantial portion of what you own in a single investment. 2. Diversification of what you own is a command from the Lord, not a request. 3. It is our responsibility to learn how to properly diversify our assets. 4. Never invest in anything that you do not thoroughly understand.
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Robert Katz (Biblical Roads to Financial Freedom: Simple Steps to Prosperity on Earth and Treasures in Heaven)
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Investing your personal wealth, and diversifying your security is a wise strategy to safeguard your financial independence.
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Corey Wayne (Mastering Yourself, How To Align Your Life With Your True Calling & Reach Your Full Potential)
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High-yield bonds—which Graham calls “second-grade” or “lower-grade” and today are called “junk bonds”—get a brisk thumbs-down from Graham. In his day, it was too costly and cumbersome for an individual investor to diversify away the risks of default.;1 (To learn how bad a default can be, and how carelessly even “sophisticated” professional bond investors can buy into one, see the sidebar on p. 146.) Today, however, more than 130 mutual funds specialize in junk bonds. These funds buy junk by the cartload; they hold dozens of different bonds. That mitigates Graham’s complaints about the difficulty of diversifying. (However, his bias against high-yield preferred stock remains valid, since there remains no cheap and widely available way to spread their risks.) Since 1978, an annual average of 4.4% of the junk-bond market has gone into default—but, even after those defaults, junk bonds have still produced an annualized return of 10.5%, versus 8.6% for 10-year U.S. Treasury bonds.2 Unfortunately, most junk-bond funds charge high fees and do a poor job of preserving the original principal amount of your investment. A junk fund could be appropriate if you are retired, are looking for extra monthly income to supplement your pension, and can tolerate temporary tumbles in value. If you work at a bank or other financial company, a sharp rise in interest rates could limit your raise or even threaten your job security—so a junk fund, which tends to outper-forms most other bond funds when interest rates rise, might make sense as a counterweight in your 401(k). A junk-bond fund, though, is only a minor option—not an obligation—for the intelligent investor.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Create a simple, diversified asset allocation plan. Invest a part of each paycheck in low-cost, no-load index funds according to your plan. Check your investments periodically, rebalance when necessary, then stay the course.
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Taylor Larimore (The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing)
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Warren Buffett is saying that portfolio concentration, or focusing on a few investments rather than diversifying, is a better strategy.
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Robert T. Kiyosaki (Rich Dad's Cashflow Quadrant: Rich Dad's Guide to Financial Freedom)
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If international investing interests you and you see it as a good way to be more diversified (beyond the U.S. stock market), then consider exchange-traded funds (ETFs) as a convenient way to do it.
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Paul Mladjenovic (Stock Investing for Dummies)
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Well, folks, you can see that those superscrapers came through the storm just fine. It’s too bad they’re mostly empty right now. I mean they’re residential towers supposedly, but they were always too expensive for ordinary people to afford. They’re like big granaries for holding money, basically. You have to imagine them all stuffed to the top with dollar bills. The richest people from all over the world own the apartments in those towers. They’re an investment, or maybe a tax write-off. Diversify into real estate, as they say. While also having a place to visit whenever you happen to want to visit New York. A vacation place they might use for only a week or two every year. Depends what they like. They usually own about a dozen of these places around the world. Spread their holdings around. So really these towers are just assets. They’re money. They’re like big tall purple gold bars. They’re everything except housing....
Now, here below us is Central Park. It’s a refugee camp now, you can see that. It’s likely to be that for weeks and months to come. Maybe a year. People will be sleeping in the park. Lots of tents already, as you see....
So you know what? I’m sick of the rich. I just am. I’m sick of them running this whole planet for themselves. They’re wrecking it! So I think we should take it back, and take care of it. And take care of each other as part of that. No more table scraps. You know that Householders’ Union that I was telling you about? I think it’s time for everyone to join that union, and for that union to go on strike. An everybody strike. I think there should be an everybody strike. Now. Today....
What I mean by a householders’strike is you just stop paying your rents and mortgages ... maybe also your student loans and insurance payments. Any private debt you’ve taken on just to make you and your family safe. The daily necessities of existence. The union is declaring all those to be odious debts, like some kind of blackmail on us, and we’re demanding they be renegotiated ... So, we stop paying and call that the Jubilee? ... That’s an old name for this kind of thing. After we start this Jubilee, until there’s a restructuring that forgives a lot of our debt, we aren’t paying anything.
You might think that not paying your mortgage would get you in trouble, and it’s true that if it was just you, that might happen. But when everyone does it, that makes it a strike. Civil disobedience. A revolution. So everyone needs to join in. Won’t be that hard. Just don’t pay your bills!
... What will happen then is that the absence of those payments of ours will cause the banks to crash fast. They take our payments and use them as collateral to borrow tons more, to fund their own gambling, and they are way, way, way overextended. Overleveraged....
At that point they will be asking the government to bail them out. That’s us. We’re the government. At least in theory, but yeah. We are. So we can decide what to do then. We will have to tell our government what to do at that point. If our government tries to back the banks instead of us, then we elect a different government. We pretend that democracy is real, and that will make it real. We elect a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. That was the whole idea in the first place. As they used to tell us in school. And it’s a good idea, if we could make it real. It might never have been real, up till now. But now’s the time. Now’s the time, people!
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Kim Stanley Robinson (New York 2140)
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Well, folks, you can see that those superscrapers came through the storm just fine. It’s too bad
they’re mostly empty right now. I mean they’re residential towers supposedly, but they were always too expensive for ordinary people to afford. They’re like big granaries for holding money, basically. You have to imagine them all stuffed to the top with dollar bills. The richest people from all over the world own the apartments in those towers. They’re an investment, or maybe a tax write-off. Diversify into real estate, as they say. While also having a place to visit whenever you happen to want to visit New York. A vacation place they might use for only a week or two every year. Depends what they like. They usually own about a dozen of these places around the world. Spread their holdings around. So really these towers are just assets. They’re money. They’re like big tall purple gold bars. They’re everything except housing....
Now, here below us is Central Park. It’s a refugee camp now, you can see that. It’s likely to be that for weeks and months to come. Maybe a year. People will be sleeping in the park. Lots of tents already, as you see....
So you know what? I’m sick of the rich. I just am. I’m sick of them running this whole planet for themselves. They’re wrecking it! So I think we should take it back, and take care of it. And take care of each other as part of that. No more table scraps. You know that Householders’ Union that I was telling you about? I think it’s time for everyone to join that union, and for that union to go on strike. An everybody strike. I think there should be an everybody strike. Now. Today....
What I mean by a householders’strike is you just stop paying your rents and mortgages ... maybe also your student loans and insurance payments. Any private debt you’ve taken on just to make you and your family safe. The daily necessities of existence. The union is declaring all those to be odious debts, like some kind of blackmail on us, and we’re demanding they be renegotiated ... So, we stop paying and call that the Jubilee? ... That’s an old name for this kind of thing. After we start this Jubilee, until there’s a restructuring that forgives a lot of our debt, we aren’t paying anything.
You might think that not paying your mortgage would get you in trouble, and it’s true that if it was just you, that might happen. But when everyone does it, that makes it a strike. Civil disobedience. A revolution. So everyone needs to join in. Won’t be that hard. Just don’t pay your bills!
... What will happen then is that the absence of those payments of ours will cause the banks to
crash fast. They take our payments and use them as collateral to borrow tons more, to fund their own gambling, and they are way, way, way overextended. Overleveraged....
At that point they will be asking the government to bail them out. That’s us. We’re the
government. At least in theory, but yeah. We are. So we can decide what to do then. We will have to tell our government what to do at that point. If our government tries to back the banks instead of us, then we elect a different government. We pretend that democracy is real, and that will make it real. We elect a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. That was the whole idea in the first place. As they used to tell us in school. And it’s a good idea, if we could make it real. It might never have been real, up till now. But now’s the time. Now’s the time, people!
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Kim Stanley Robinson (New York 2140)
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Unfortunately, the Bull that gilded Renaissance New York did little for most Americans. Eighties Wall Street was about institutional money released by deregulation, mergers and acquisitions, and, most of all, the debt that made it all possible. As John Kenneth Galbraith points out, financial euphoria always starts with new ways to borrow money; this time it was triggered by the Savings & Loan crisis. Volcker’s rocketing interest rates had forced S&Ls to offer double digits to new depositors while only getting back single digits on the old thirty-year mortgages on their books. S&Ls were going under, and getting a mortgage was nearly impossible, so in March 1980, with the banking system and the housing market on the brink, Carter had signed a law to allow them to issue credit cards, invest in commercial real estate, and offer checking accounts in order to stay in business. Reagan then took it a step further with a change that encouraged S&Ls to sell their mortgages in search of higher returns, freeing up a $1 trillion that needed to be invested in something. Which takes us back to Salomon Brothers, where in 1978 one Lew Ranieri had repackaged an old investment product the government had clamped down on during the Depression: A group of home mortgages all backed by government insurance would be bundled together, then sliced into bonds, thus converting the debt some people owed on their homes into an asset for others. Ranieri had been a bit ahead of the curve then—the same high interest rates that killed the S&Ls also made his bonds unattractive—but now deregulation let Salomon buy up the S&Ls’ mortgages at a deep discount, bundle them into bonds, and sell them back to the S&Ls who believed they’d diversified into the bond market when in fact they’d just bought ground meat made out of their own steaks. In June 1983, Salomon Brothers and Freddie Mac together issued the first collateralized mortgage obligation bonds (CMOs), which bundled up debt and cut it into tranches based on the amount of risk: you could choose between ground chuck and ground sirloin. It would be years before technology would allow doing this on a huge scale, but the immediate impact was that all kinds of debt, not just mortgages, were bundled, cut into bonds, and sold: credit card debt, car loans, you name it. Between 1983 and 1988, some $60 billion of CMOs were sold; GM’s financing arm became more profitable than its cars. America began to make debt instead of things. The
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Thomas Dyja (New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation (Must-Read American History))
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Life as an Enron employee was good. Prestwood’s annual salary rose steadily to sixty-five thousand dollars, with additional retirement benefits paid in Enron stock. When Houston Natural and Internorth had merged, all of Prestwood’s investments were automatically converted to Enron stock. He continued to set aside money in the company’s retirement fund, buying even more stock. Internally, the company relentlessly promoted employee stock ownership. Newsletters touted Enron’s growth as “simply stunning,” and Lay, at company events, urged employees to buy more stock. To Prestwood, it didn’t seem like a problem that his future was tied directly to Enron’s. Enron had committed to him, and he was showing his gratitude. “To me, this is the American way, loyalty to your employer,” he says. Prestwood was loyal to the bitter end. When he retired in 2000, he had accumulated 13,500 shares of Enron stock, worth $1.3 million at their peak. Then, at age sixty-eight, Prestwood suddenly lost his entire Enron nest egg. He now survives on a previous employer’s pension of $521 a month and a Social Security check of $1,294. “There aint no such thing as a dream anymore,” he says. He lives on a three-acre farm north of Houston willed to him as a baby in 1938 after his mother died. “I hadn’t planned much for the retirement. Wanted to go fishing, hunting. I was gonna travel a little.” Now he’ll sell his family’s land. Has to, he says. He is still paying off his mortgage.7 In some respects, Prestwood’s case is not unusual. Often people do not diversify at all, and sometimes employees invest a lot of their money in their employer’s stock. Amazing but true: five million Americans have more than 60 percent of their retirement savings in company stock.8 This concentration is risky on two counts. First, a single security is much riskier than the portfolios offered by mutual funds. Second, as employees of Enron and WorldCom discovered the hard way, workers risk losing both their jobs and the bulk of their retirement savings all at once.
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Richard H. Thaler (Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness)
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We know a very successful executive who, upon retirement, put all his investments into high-quality, diversified, municipal bonds. The income from the bonds is more than sufficient for his family’s lifestyle. This executive wants to spend his time traveling and on the golf course—not managing a complex portfolio of assorted securities. His simple portfolio may be unusual, but we think it’s probably a very suitable portfolio for him. However, most of us want a return greater than is available from savings, CDs, and bonds. This is why we use stocks to provide the growth and additional income needed to meet our goals. DESIGNING OUR PERSONAL ASSET ALLOCATION PLAN We have discussed the Efficient Market Theory and Modern Portfolio Theory.
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Taylor Larimore (The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing)
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Large-cap U.S. Stock S&P 500 Index Midcap U.S. Stock S&P Midcap 400 Index Small-cap U.S. Value stock Russell 2000 Value Index Non-U.S. Developed stock MSCI EAFE Index Non-U.S. Emerging stock MSCI Emerging Markets Index Real Estate Dow Jones U.S. Select REIT Index Natural Resources Goldman Sachs Natural Resources Index Commodities Deutsche Bank Liquid Commodity Index U.S. Bonds Barclays Capital Aggregate Bond Index Inflation Protected Bonds Barclays Capital U.S. Treasury Inflation Note Index Non-U.S. Bonds Citibank WGBI Non-U.S. Dollar Index Cash 3-Month Treasury Bill
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Craig L. Israelsen (7Twelve: A Diversified Investment Portfolio with a Plan)
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A lightbulb turned on when I realized the investors I admire the most (and this admiration comes only in part from the amazing success they’ve achieved) tend to share one characteristic: They are concentrated value investors. That is, they adhere to a concentrated approach to portfolio construction, holding a small number of securities as opposed to a broadly diversified portfolio.
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Allen C. Benello (Concentrated Investing: Strategies of the World's Greatest Concentrated Value Investors)
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JIM COULTER: One of the challenges in the investment business is what I’ll call uncommon wisdom. Common wisdom is what people think about a situation; it’s usually not that valuable because it’s something everybody sees. What is valuable is if you find uncommon wisdom, which is where you see something that the rest of the world sees one way and you see a different way. So when I first ran into CAA, my reaction was actually common wisdom that Hollywood agencies might be difficult to invest in, because they’re people businesses, and maybe not great stewards of capital. What surprised me is the deeper I looked, the more uncommon wisdom showed up, and things that I might have expected to be true weren’t necessarily the case. In 2010, when we first looked at the company, their sports business was still new, still in start-up phase, and still in cash flow negative. We looked at that business and could say, “Here’s something that represents a breakout opportunity for this business.” Concert touring was a much bigger business than I would have expected from the outside, and the strength of the TV business was stronger than I would have expected. The stickiness of CAA’s businesses and the resilience of their businesses were much stronger than I expected. The light went off for me that this is not only an agency; it is a content play because of their extraordinary access to a very large pool of content. As the value of content increases around the world, an investment in CAA would be the most diversified and interesting way to be in that marketplace.
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James Andrew Miller (Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency)
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By diversifying your income streams, consistently looking for new ways to make more money, and investing as much money as possible, you are giving yourself more control over your financial destiny and protecting yourself in the event something disrupts one of your income streams.
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Grant Sabatier (Financial Freedom: A Proven Path to All the Money You Will Ever Need)
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To get on the financial Fast Track, become an expert at solving a certain type of problem. Do not diversify like Type-B investors are advised to do. Become an expert at solving one type of problem, and people will come to you with money to invest.
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Robert T. Kiyosaki (Rich Dad's CASHFLOW Quadrant: Rich Dad's Guide to Financial Freedom)
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In diversifying blockchain portfolio, there is a common pattern. And that is, what you thought was solid foundation turned into liquid, and what you thought was liquid turned into a solid foundation.
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Olawale Daniel
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The kingdom’s population was growing, costs were rising, and the rest of the world was talking with more urgency about using less oil. What would happen when oil prices dropped? To ward off a catastrophe, Alwaleed argued, Saudi Arabia needed to diversify, invest in solar and nuclear energy, and start moving some of its oil wealth abroad so it would have diversified sources of income.
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Bradley Hope (Blood and Oil: Mohammed bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power: 'The Explosive New Book')
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In fact, Yale’s return for the ten years ending June 30, 1998 amounted to 15.5 percent per annum, more than three full percentage points short of the S&P 500’s 18.6 percent result. The endowment’s deficit relative to the then-highest-performing asset class of domestic equity caused naysayers to question the wisdom of undertaking the difficult task of creating a well-diversified equity-oriented portfolio.
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David F. Swensen (Pioneering Portfolio Management: An Unconventional Approach to Institutional Investment, Fully Revised and Updated)
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Given the difficulties in timing markets and the challenges of security selection, such behavior provides a rational foundation for investment management. By avoiding extreme allocation shifts and holding diversified portfolios, investors cause asset allocation to account for the largest share of portfolio returns.
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David F. Swensen (Pioneering Portfolio Management: An Unconventional Approach to Institutional Investment, Fully Revised and Updated)
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Ultimately, Unconventional Success proposes a positive solution to the investments challenge facing individual investors. The investment management world includes a very small number of not-for-profit money management firms, allowing investors the opportunity to invest with organizations devoted exclusively to fulfilling fiduciary obligations. Moreover, the market contains a number of attractively structured, passively managed investment alternatives, affording investors the opportunity to create equity-oriented, broadly diversified portfolios. In spite of the massive failure of the mutual-fund industry, investors willing to take an unconventional approach to portfolio management enjoy the opportunity to achieve financial success.
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David F. Swensen (Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment)
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In its most basic form, the message of Unconventional Success requires only a few pages to describe the blueprint of a well-diversified, equity-oriented, passively managed portfolio, using not-for-profit investment managers to implement the plan.
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David F. Swensen (Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment)