Caveat Emptor

Revisiting the Fama And French Model Serious investors whom have a decent foundation in quantitative finance will have came across the Fama and French 3 Factor model in his readings. Huge amounts of investment research and literature and quantitative asset pricing models are based on this. Even hedge funds or robo-advisers whom reject the efficient market hypothesis / CAPM have their key assumptions / origins based on the writings of Fama and French. With the large number of market commentary commenting about the death of the value premium (including a professor I greatly respect), I am exceptionally lucky to come across a recent commentary by French (March 2020) whom originated the model. His views will be more factual compared to the marketing speak of robo-advisers / investment trainers whom like to tout recent market volatility as a permanent change of things, or based their materials on outdated data and analysis. For an active investor whom utilises hybrid active stock picking an...

ETF opportunities and risks One great thing about studying for the CFA is that you can tie the curriculum syllabus to real life examples and observe the motion in progress. I had a tendency to put in considerably more time and effort to studying certain topics like Real Estate (and REITS) , corporate finance, Equity investing and ETFs compared to the other topics combined.  As an enthusiast in ETF investing, I have significant holdings in STI ETF and is eager to gain knowledge and exposure to global ones. One key limitation about the CFA is that it is only good at explaining historical examples and is backward looking . Elaborate discussions about macroeconomic models and DCF will not be able to explain the implications of QE and negative interest rates, and the appropriate discount rates to apply. Howard Marks Latest <Mysterious> Memo explores the implications of negative I/R on risk seeking behavior, and inverted relationships whereby historical models may no longer pr...

Things you wished the CFA taught you in plain English   After  spending one torturous year studying for my CFA level 1, I am going back to the pits of hell to attempt for my level 2 exams. The difficulty of the content is unquestioned, and the use of convoluted English in a roundabout matter probably contributed significantly to its high failure rate. To fulfill my objective to become a better investor and learner, I shall attempt to consolidate the fragmented parts of the curriculum into a series of simplified <CFA Series> blog posts. In my onerous quest to attain the charter, I sometimes forget that the lessons gleaned from an applied CFA curriculum are equally important. The purpose of the CFA is to improve my skills as an investor, and one sure way to arrive at the truth is to reject the Null hypothesis and stay away from the obvious traps. Charlie Munger's famous quote < All I Want To Know Is Where I'm Going To Die So I'll Never Go There> ...