Topic Guide
Welcome to the Occam Investing topic guide.
This page contains links to all articles written on the blog, organised by topic. It also contains my ideas for future posts.
I don’t publish according to any set schedule, so if you’d like to be notified when a new post is published, you can subscribe to receive updates via email by using the link in the sidebar.
- Why should I invest? / How much can I expect to make from investing?
- Should I save or invest?
- How much do I need to start investing?
- Am I ready to invest?
- What can I invest in?
- How do I invest?
- Why you need an Investment Policy Statement
- How to create an Investment Policy Statement
- Is now a good time to invest?
- Should I invest all at once or drip feed?
- What is diversification and why do I need it?
- The market is crashing, what should I do?
- Why do stocks go up?
- Is investing gambling?
- Is investing a zero-sum game?
- Beware graphs bearing outperformance
- The predictive power of fees
- Why I track my spending
- How to fail at investing
- When should I sell my investment?
- How much of my salary should I be investing?
- Equity funds
- The best Vanguard equity funds
- Is dividend investing a good strategy?
- Equity funds – to hedge or not to hedge?
- Bond funds
- The best Vanguard bond funds
- How to predict bond returns
- Is the stock/bond correlation about to turn positive?
- Have bonds ever failed?
- All about inflation-linked bonds
- Why you should own inflation-linked bonds
- Why you shouldn’t own inflation-linked bonds
- Should you own inflation-linked bonds?
- Duration matching: an introduction
- Should you invest in corporate bonds?
- Bonds vs bond funds
- Bonds – to hedge or not to hedge?
- Other asset classes
- What’s the best crash protection for your portfolio?
- Should you invest in gold?
- Should you invest in a concentrated fund?
- Against thematic funds
- Against hedge funds
- Against other alternatives
- General
Introduction
- Active vs passive – what’s in a name?
- Can anyone be truly passive? In search of the Global Market Portfolio
Active vs passive performance – the evidence
Arguments for active management
- What is factor investing?
- Valuations vs long term returns
- Risk parity
- Irrational markets
- You’re not human
Arguments for passive management
- Performance
- Active vs passive performance: The evidence
- Performance persistence
- Why do passives outperform?
- In theory: Sharpe’s Arithmetic of Active Management
- In practice: The predictive power of fees
- The market is efficient
- The market is becoming more efficient
- Positive skew
- Requires no forecasting
- Has no minimum investment requirements
- Has no capacity constraints (no style drift)
- Doesn’t require picking winning fund managers in advance (luck vs skill)
- Doesn’t require deciding whether to stick with underperforming managers, and has no temptation to chase the latest hot manager (lower behaviour gap)
- Doesn’t incur the risk of a manager having to close/suspend/merge their fund (survivorship bias)
- Has fewer conflicts of interest
- Becomes more powerful the more people adopt it
- Other benefits of passive
- Transparency
- Simplicity
- Takes less time to monitor
- Less stressful, fewer decisions required
- ‘Beating the market’ is not a financial goal
- Problems with smart beta
- Valuations and timing the market
- Closet indexing and herding
- Peer group rankings
- Self-selecting benchmarks
- The uselessness of forecasting
- Focus on things you can control
- Asset allocation drives most of your returns
Debunking the myths of passive investing
- Is passive investing causing a bubble?
- The claim: Passives are causing a bubble
- What is a passive investment?
- The evidence:
- Sharpe’s Arithmetic of Active Management
- The market share of passive investing
- Is passive investing setting prices?
- Passive investing and market crashes
- Is passive investing making the market more concentrated?
- Are large stocks getting larger?
- Where are all the outperforming active managers?
- Why passive investing is increasing market efficiency
- Summary of the series
- Actives can help you avoid crashes
- Actives outperform in less efficient markets
- Passives buy all stocks, actives buy only good stocks
- Actives give a chance of outperforming
- Active management works for bonds
- Passives don’t contribute to price discovery
- Passives don’t allocate capital efficiently or manage corporate governance
- Passives reduce dispersion and increase correlations
- The market is irrational
- ‘We are not average’
- Passives are untested in a downturn
- Passives have only done well because of QE
- Passives are un-diversified
- Index tracking is momentum investing
- Do DIY investors underperform?
- Why you should outsource your investments
- Why you should manage your own investments
- The best investing blogs
- The best investing books for beginners
- My 5 favourite books of 2020
- Average pension pots [UK]
- Average UK savings by age
- How much money is in the world?
- Why do we buy expensive investments?
- Average UK salary by age
- Investor behaviour – behavioural biases and the behaviour gap
- Avoiding the news
- How does an ETF work?
- Tax efficient investing
- Understanding investment performance
- How do I choose a good passive equity fund?
- How do I choose a good passive bond fund?
- Index funds vs ETFs
- Individual bonds vs bond funds
- A diversifier or a hedge? Understanding bond funds
- Should I invest in the market or a BTL property?
- Should I rent or buy?
- Interest rate effects on stocks/bonds
- Do I need a financial adviser?
- Investing tips
- Sequence of returns risk
- Your returns depend on when you’re born – as do your perceptions of risk. Focus on what you can control.
- The uselessness of peer group benchmarks
- Why there will always be bubbles and crashes
- Avoiding fads/The danger of speculation – how losses are disproportionately bad
- ESG
- Investment consultants