Investments - intellectualfinance.com

Why a “Strong Economy” Can Actually Be Bad News for Your Portfolio

Financial Economics, Financial Markets, Investments, Markets & Economics

Everyone loves good economic news. Rising GDP, falling unemployment, consumer spending through the roof. Politicians celebrate it, financial commentators cheer it, and your neighbor won’t stop talking about how great business is at his company. The economy is humming, and naturally, your portfolio should be soaring too. Except it doesn’t work that way. Here’s the […]

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The Case for Stop Chasing Alpha: Why the Sharpe Ratio is the Only Metric That Matters

Investing, Investments, Mutual Fund Performance

Many investors are playing the wrong game. They obsess over returns like kids comparing Halloween candy hauls, bragging about how much they got while conveniently forgetting to mention the stomach aches. The financial industry encourages this myopia because it sells products. Beat the market. Alpha generation. Outperformance. These phrases populate marketing materials like confetti at

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How to Build a Portfolio Immune to Noise (5 Steps to Escaping the Financial Herd Mentality)

Behavioral Finance, Contrarian Investing, Herd Mentality, Investing, Investments

The financial markets have a peculiar way of making intelligent people feel stupid and reckless people feel like geniuses. At least until the cycle reverses. This isn’t a bug in the system. It’s the feature that keeps most investors locked in a perpetual state of anxiety, refreshing their brokerage apps and second guessing every decision

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If You Can’t Calculate NAV, You Shouldn’t Be Investing in Funds

Investments, NAV, Net Asset Value

Net Asset Value is absurdly simple to calculate. You take what a fund owns, subtract what it owes, and divide by the number of shares. A middle schooler could do it. Yet most people who invest in mutual funds have never calculated NAV once in their lives, and they’re doing just fine. So this isn’t

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The ESG Trap: Is ‘Ethical Investing’ Just a Marketing Ploy for Pension Funds?

Financial Markets, Investing, Investments

Your retirement savings might be working harder at looking good than doing good. Pension funds have discovered something remarkable in recent years. They can charge higher fees, attract positive media coverage, and appease activist shareholders simply by slapping three letters onto their investment strategy: ESG. Environmental, Social, and Governance investing promises to align your money

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The Math of Recovery: Why a 50% Loss Needs a 100% Gain

Risk & Return, Editors Pick, Investments

We think in straight lines. Our minds prefer symmetry. If something falls by half, we assume it needs to rise by half to return to where it started. This intuition, so natural and automatic, is completely wrong. And this wrongness costs people fortunes. The arithmetic is simple enough. If you have $100 and lose 50%,

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The Case Why to Choose 8% Growth Over a 10% Dividend?

Growth vs Value, Dividends, Investments

The numbers seem to make no sense. Ten is larger than eight. A bird in hand beats two in the bush. Cash today trumps promises of tomorrow. And yet, the most successful investors often choose the smaller number, the distant hope, the unrealized gain. This paradox reveals something deeper than spreadsheets can capture about how

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Digital Rent: How to “Own” the Internet Infrastructure Through Dividends

Dividends, infrastructure investing, Investment Theme, Investments

You probably think the internet is free. You open your laptop, connect to WiFi, and suddenly have access to the entire world. No toll booths. No admission fees. Just pure, democratic access to information and entertainment. Except someone owns every inch of it. Every email you send travels through cables owned by someone. Every video

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The Analyst Game: Why Earnings Per Share Forecasts Are Designed to Be Wrong

Investments

Every quarter, a curious ritual unfolds in the financial markets. Companies report their earnings, and the world watches to see if they “beat,” “meet,” or “miss” analyst expectations. Stock prices surge or plummet based on these outcomes. Fortunes change hands. Headlines blare the results. But here’s what almost no one stops to consider: the whole

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The 3-Watch Portfolio: How to Build a Low-Risk, High-Return Collection

Watches, Investments

The trouble with watches as investments is that they were never meant to be investments at all, let alone 3-Watch Portfolio. They were meant to tell time. That we’ve turned them into speculative assets says more about us than it does about them. But here we are, and if you’re going to play this game,

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