Is there a sense of “swimming upstream” when trying to propagate goal-based investing--as described in your new book Risk Less and Prosper--among existing financial advisors? Conventional practices and economic incentives are so heavily skewed towards modern portfolio theory and growing assets under management. 

Pacific Investment Management Company (Pimco) founder and co-chief investment officer Bill Gross offered a revised view of the global investing landscape in a letter published on the company’s website. 

As the manager of the Pimco Total Return Fund, Gross’s 2011 investment decisions were driven in part by the “new normal” thesis. 

The new normal view suggests that investors should seek emerging market debt because developed countries will experience a prolonged period of sluggish growth, high unemployment and inflation. 

Liquidity or lack thereof tends to be a major concern when it comes to annuities.

Many financial advisors and consumers are reluctant to use annuities because money allocated to annuity products tends to be tied-up and inaccessible for a period of time.  In other words, annuities lack liquidity or are “illiquid.”

In contrast, exchange traded funds (ETF) or shares of IBM stock are highly liquid as they can almost always be easily sold for cash.   

Wally Weitz is a hugely successful and yet relatively low profile money manager.

His performance over a very long period of time credibly places him among the world’s top performing investors.

Like his Omaha neighbor Warren Buffett, Weitz is a deep value investor.  His fundamental investing criteria is the price of a security relative to its intrinsic value—the lower the price the better.

In the video below, Weitz speaks to Bloomberg about his biggest investment mistake.

The Wall Street Journal recently published an interview (see the video below) with entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.

The interview is interesting for a number of reasons.  Cuban talks about investing his own money and he offers some suggestions for regular, non high net worth investors. 

In a nutshell, Cuban strongly believes that the “buy and hold” approach to investing is a worthless strategy.

Bear Funds or mutual funds that are intended to prosper during down markets have actually performed poorly over the past decade. 

One would think that the past decade would have provided the perfect environment for these types of investment vehicles.

As reported in Bloomberg, though, a Pimco bear market mutual fund run by Bill Gross is the only fund of its type to beat U.S. stocks over the past five years.  According the the Bloomberg article:

Simple, web-based portfolio management tools have been proliferating over the past couple of years.

As reported recently by Bloomberg, companies such as Folio Investing, MarketRiders and Flat Fee Portfolios are providing subscription-based wealth management solutions that are largely automated and relatively inexpensive.

There is a strong case to be made for health care as the linchpin of retirement planning.  Virtually every major aspect of the retirement planning process is somehow correlated to or contingent on health status.  For example, health status has an impact on each of the following retirement planning components:

Meir Statman is the Glenn Klimek Professor of Finance at the Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University, and Visiting Professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

His research on behavioral finance has been supported by the National Science Foundation, CFA Institute, and Investment Management Consultants Association (IMCA) and has been published in the Journal of Finance, Financial Analysts Journal, Journal of Portfolio Management, and many other publications.

Coverage of annuities by the broader financial media tends to be negative, with much of the criticism focused on annuity expenses.

The criticism is typically accompanied by a blue-sky investing scenario that makes the case for annuities that much less compelling.  The theoretical retail investor in such a blue-sky scenario invests with perfect discipline, efficiency and rationality in the lowest cost index fund over some absurdly arbitrary time-frame.