Investing Insights for the Modern Investor

In this episode we cover dig into the latest investment craze...SPACs. Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (“SPACs”) are extremely complex and have historically been highly efficient wealth destroyers for retail investors. Complexity obfuscates the risks and costs investors will bear. If you are thinking of investing in a complex structured deal like a SPAC and you are wondering who is most likely to bear the greatest risk and costs, it is probably you. The richest people on Wall Street are not necessarily the best investors, but the best deal makers. They are experts at structuring heads I win, tails you lose deals, where the financial success of their investors has little to no bearing on their own financial rewards.

Investors are facing economic conditions that have not been seen for 40 years. This quarter, we will examine how to measure and evaluate stock market valuations and then identify the driving economic forces responsible for their rise to such significant levels. Finally, we will discuss the economic mechanisms that pull valuations back towards their mean, what indicators investors should be monitoring and what those indicators may foreshadow for stock prices and valuations going forward.

Some traders are making millions or tens of millions of dollars on their GameStop holdings, while several hedge funds are losing billions of dollars. A huge number of small retail traders have been taking it to the billion-dollar hedge funds that have large short positions in GameStop, and these retail traders are a vicious pack out for blood. This zero-sum battle between small retail investors taking long positions (betting the stock will go up) and big money hedge funds on the short side of the trade (betting the stock will go down) led to a massive short squeeze that propelled the price of GameStop into a parabolic move to the moon.

Something is wrong with the S&P 500 Index. Risk is very high for U.S. stock investors. In this episode we break down the risk and opportunities for stock investors and provide strategies for navigating this risky market.

In this episode we share powerful risk management strategies that address the shortfalls of conventional diversification, offer protection from large investment losses, and drive the opportunity for higher long-term returns.

Performance chasing is one of the biggest mistakes investors make. Learn why performance chasing can be so detrimental to successful investing and how to avoid it.

Conventional diversification is a useful risk management tool, however its tendency to fail when it is needed most is rarely understood or acknowledged within the investment management industry. We explore conventional diversification, how it works and why it frequently fails at the time of greatest need.

In this Episode we show you how an investor could have turned $300,000 into $272,000,000, why you should not try and do that yourself, and if you must speculate in the stock market, how to maximize your already low odds of success. Join Dan as he discusses how to speculate in stocks.

Would you like to have the opportunity to improve your long-term investment performance by 20%, 30% and maybe even more than 50%? This magnitude of performance improvement is possible and how it can be achieved has absolutely nothing to do with picking better investments or finding the next hot stock. These gains in investment performance can be realized in the difference between being an ordinary investor and a GREAT investor.

In this episode I discuss why I believe Mutual Funds are bad investments in general. Mutual funds are the sacred cow of the largest investment firms, believe me, I do not make any friends among investing peers when talking about this topic. However, I have always believed that investment decisions should not be driven by the status quo within the industry, but that any investment approach should be able to stand up to the rigors of evidence-based analysis.

Fair warning, I am confident the topic I will cover today will blow your mind and hopefully cause you to question much of what you have learned about investing. I am being perfectly serious. What I am about to show you, flips the common investing wisdom upside-down. The concepts I lay out in this Investing Insight are at the foundation of my investing philosophy and the driving force behind 3Summit’s innovations in portfolio design and management. I hope the investing secrets I am going to share with you today inspire and inform your investing process as much as they have mine.

Markets have been more volatile lately and we may be in the final innings of a long bull market. The current market conditions make for a great time to discuss trend following and the many benefits they add to a diversified portfolio, especially in challenging markets.

This episode discusses ETF's, what they are, how they compare to mutual funds and how ETF's can be used to implement sophisticated quantitative investment strategies.