Index fund investors and pseudo-index fund investors must be prepared for a decade of mediocre returns. Stock investors looking for the fast lane will find it clogged. Frustration and other symptoms of unmanageability will be common. Should indexing lose popularity, returns will turn negative as investors seek alternatives. If the herd abandons the index funds [...]
For investors tired of watching mutual fund managers make lousy decisions and underperform the market, mutual fund families invented the index fund. The manager of the index fund buys and holds the stocks in the market index. Index funds return exactly what the market returns. Index funds have become extremely popular in the last decade. [...]
It is clear that during many of the past 50 years, risk-free investments such as Treasury bonds offered real after-tax returns that were either negative or in the low single digits for high-bracket investors. (For example, a 5 percent nominal return in a 40 percent tax bracket with 3 percent inflation is a zero percent [...]
In this section, we examine the delinquency and roll rates, and the default and loss severity of subprime loans. The delinquency status of a loan indicates the number of days the borrower is contractually past due (i.e., days past due or dpd). The loan delinquency statistics may be calculated using either the Mortgage Bankers Association [...]
Analyzing CDO performance is challenging because there is no publicly available secondary market data. Furthermore, there are no readily available performance statistics or CDO indexes to gauge total returns. Certain proxies for CDO collateral performance exist, such as leveraged-loan closed funds (as a proxy for CLOs), synthetic residential MBS indexes, and leveraged-loan indexes, but due [...]
Democrats and Republicans have settled in the U.S. Congress on a 700 billion euro package for heavy rescue ailing financial institutions agreed. The Democratic chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Chris Dodd, said on Thursday after two talks: “We are very confident that we can act expeditiously.” Republican Senator Bob Bennett said: “I expect now [...]
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