Institutional plan sponsors make lousy decisions
Institutional plan sponsors don’t know what the heck they’re doing when they make asset allocation decisions. At least that’s the conclusion I’m tempted to draw after reading “Absence of Value: An Analysis of Investment Allocation Decisions by Institutional Plan Sponsors,”(subscription or membership may be required to access article) Financial Analysts Journal (Nov./Dec. 2009) by Scott […]
Tips for keeping your credit score high
Credit scores are important in the financial lives of your clients, so I’d like to share a few tips I picked up at “Understanding Credit and Credit Risk Scores,” a presentation by Todd Overstreet, director of field sales and service at Rels Credit, the credit reporting agency for Wells Fargo, at the Women’s Business Network […]
Bloggers, one theme per post, please
Blog posts aren’t books. You only have time to make one major point per post. In support of my thesis, I offer three quotes from The Elements of Story: Field Notes on Nonfiction Writing by Francis Flaherty, an editor at The New York Times. “A writer is like a gardener who knows one tree can […]
Poll about overweight, but not the stuff of New Year’s resolutions
I grapple with “overweight” at the end of every year and every quarter. It’s the kind of overweight measured in percentage points, not pounds. That’s because I’m writing performance reports for institutional mutual funds that may overweight or underweight sectors relative to the funds’ benchmarks. I haven’t found any guidelines about how to write about […]
RIAs with DC assets are in demand by fund companies
Registered investment advisors (RIAs), if you control significant defined contribution (DC) assets, then mutual fund companies are hungry for your business and will do whatever they can to accommodate you. That’s the message I took away from “The 2010 Distribution Landscape,” at panel at the NICSA East Coast Conference on Jan. 14. The panel, which […]