Osbon on the Money

With nearly a thousand flavors now available at the ETF buffet, where do you even begin to fill your plate? Start with the major food groups. A sound investing plan begins with intentional, reasoned allocations to distinct asset classes. While it is easy to become enamored with specific stocks or ETFs, determining how to spread investments across asset classes, based…

Certain investors and investments take on a mystical aura from time to time. That’s certainly the case today with John Paulson and gold. Paulson is currently the largest holder of gold in ETF form, possessing more than $4 billion of the popular gold SPDR (symbol GLD) through his various hedge funds, and it has brought him great riches.

Quick, what’s the largest emerging market in the world?  Most people would say China, and measured by gross domestic product that’s clearly the case, by a wide margin. But for investors Brazil is a rising power with a bigger than expected presence in emerging market index funds.

Tales of Wall Street greed and grifting are as old as the Buttonwood Tree itself. Outrage continues to flare over reckless borrowing, insider trading, and elaborate Ponzi schemes, not to mention stupendous pay packages for executives who created investment products that nearly destroyed our financial systems. But here’s one tale of greed that never was, the story of an investing powerhouse…

When you buy a Massachusetts general obligation municipal bond, that’s what you’re doing – lending money to Governor Deval Patrick and our other elected officials. Of course they promise to pay you back, with regular interest payments along the way. But will they, or those who follow them in office, be able to?

Whatever it wants.  When the gorilla is Vanguard, the world’s largest mutual fund manager with $1.6 trillion in assets and the fund company that attracted more new assets in 2010 than any other, the gorilla is worth listening to.

Byron R. Wien, Vice Chairman, Blackstone Advisory Services, has one of the best prediction records in the business.  Over the last 25 years he has released his “10 Surprises” each January. Statistically, he has been right more than wrong.  The bonus is that is he humble and open-minded, so he is definitely worth reading to test one’s own investment assumptions…

Welcome to 2011. You would have to be a mental magician to remember exactly what you were thinking a year ago today as 2010 popped its head up over the horizon. What I recall is that most investors, rocked by the disaster of 2008 and unconvinced by the partial rebound of 2009, were feeling pretty skittish going into 2010. That…

There seem to be as many opinions today on the current price of gold as there are letters in the alphabet. Let’s look at the cold hard ABCs of gold for some clues on investment strategy.