I might be preaching to the choir here but: walk into any investment pitch and you'll hear the same obsession. Hedge funds promise 20% alphas. ETFs advertise 2x or 3x exposure. Everyone's chasing the ...

Dr. JeFreda R. Brown is a financial consultant, Certified Financial Education Instructor, and researcher who has assisted thousands of clients over a more than two-decade career. She is the CEO of ...

In the investment world, it’s common to discuss average rates of return. It’s not sufficient, however, to simply add up historical returns and divide by how many there are. The proper way to calculate ...

Since January 1, 2000, through September 30 ’23, the S&P 500 has returned 6.61%, which is below average, if we looked at arithmetic returns for the S&P 500 since 1970. What should give readers pause ...

It is clear from looking at the current landscape that volatility is rapidly becoming a key focus for asset management. Witness the birth of “low-volatility” ETFs and the popularity of ...

A common refrain among pundits today, in response to the more volatile markets recently and the potential for even more to come, is to point to the historical average annual return of stocks — for ...

False Symmetry Although it took me a while to realize it, Wednesday's column showed the effect of volatility drag. That article reviewed the bull-market case for putting the riskiest portion of a ...

Everybody loves math, right? Such an exciting topic, said very few people ever. Many schoolchildren dislike math because they think it's boring and they'll never use it in the real world. I know I ...

Leveraged exchange-traded funds, which employ derivatives to generate a multiple of a reference asset’s daily return, have been popular. We estimate they gathered around $13 billion in net inflows ...

This article is part of a series; click here to read Part 1. Using the portfolio return and volatility assumptions determined in Exhibit 1.1, we then reverse engineer fixed return assumptions and ...