Time to review the latest cutting-edge academic research, as discussed in our country’s leading business newspaper. A report in the Wall Street Journal from Monday brings us two items that expand our understanding of that mysterious beast known as the stock market.
The first item is a recently released report from the Investment Company Institute (the trade group for mutual fund companies) which revealed that the average mutual fund investor’s willingness to take risk is lower now than it was two years ago before the market experienced its well publicized unpleasantness.
It is a report that is just chock full of enlightening insights. A person only needs to skim the chart captions to learn a lot. Turns out, “Tax-Deferred Accounts Are A Popular Way to Hold Mutual Funds.” And “Fund Performance Is the Most Important Factor Shaping Opinions of the Fund Industry.” Further, “Mutual Fund Industry Favorability Rises and Falls with Stock Market Performance.”
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Earlier this week The Wall Street Journal ran a piece on, of all things, the importance of the correlation coefficients between the returns of investments. I have mixed feelings about it.
On the one hand, correlation between asset returns is a neglected subject of great importance. The mid-Twentieth Century realization of its central role was the start of modern financial theory as we now know it. A professional level understanding of risk begins and ends with correlations, so it would make some sense for amateur investors to know at least the basics.
On the other hand, the article serves as a good reminder of why they know so little. Despite being called Why the Math of Correlation Matters, it contains no math. This might be because the author worried that her readers would find the math scary and hard, but I fear it is because the author herself finds it scary and hard.
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My job as critic of personal finance advice is made a lot easier if other writers concisely summarize their points of view in easy to digest and refute bullet points. It gets even better if the other writer is argumentative, taking a neatly delineated position on a question which I can contradict.
So when I saw that Free Money Finance yesterday posted a list of Money Myths, my heart leapt. And I was not disappointed. There were eight myths listed, with bullet point explanations and links to fuller arguments from previous posts. What could be easier?
By my scoring, one of the myths really is untrue, two are so subjective that it could go either way based on interpretation, and five are not myths.
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Today I am going to write about The New York Times again.
I know. I know. I shouldn’t. I promised to stop taking the Times seriously a while back. But I just can’t stay away. Including the Thursday re-run I wrote about it twice last week. I just can’t help it. Moths and flames.
On Wednesday last the Times published Looking Ahead to the Spend-Down Years. I am honestly not sure how to characterize the topic of the article, other than to say it had to do with retirement and money and cited the work of several clueless academics with evidently too much time on their hands.
The piece was illustrated with creepy but eye-catching computer generated images of a man’s head as he aged. This was explained in the first few paragraphs.
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Labor Day Weekend is prime time for big-picture discussions in the financial press. With the cultural end of summer, and the heightened feeling of 
seriousness of the back-to-school and back-to-work season, Labor Day is a good time to review where we are and where we are going. Also, articles on broad topics can be written far in advance so that journalists can take the weekend, or entire week, off.
Thus, The Wall Street Journal recently treated us to a spate of pieces on basically the same topic, the wisdom of investing in the stock market.
Brett Arends kicked off this festival of tea leaf reading mid-week with Why Stocks Still Aren’t Cheap. Then over the weekend we got Is It Time to Scrap the Fusty Old P/E Ratio?, covering some of the same ground as Arends but with a less bearish spin, and Thinking Outside the Stocks, discussing off-beat non-stock investments.
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The first item is a recently released report from the Investment Company Institute (the trade group for mutual fund companies) which revealed that the average mutual fund investor’s willingness to take risk is lower now than it was two years ago before the market experienced its well publicized unpleasantness.
Investing, Media | Frank Curmudgeon | 
October 15, 2010 11:59 am | 
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