Best of 2013
We all have some lingering questions in our mind to which we want to know an answer. Every week, we ask a question of the 60,000 readers of CFA Institute Newsbrief. Here are the most popular polls from the past year.
When it comes to the dismal science, what happened this past year was not just a random series of events to commit to memory. It was a complex sequence of cause and effect, even when — in the immortal words of Frédéric Bastiat — the effects are unseen.
Though the market is still dominated by conventional financial instruments, recent years have seen increasing interest in SRI and Islamic finance. More than 10% of the total assets under management in the United States are now invested following SRI practices, and this year British Prime Minister David Cameron announced that the United Kingdom will become the first non-Muslim country to issue an Islamic bond.
As 2013 comes to a close, we took a look back at, and highlight below, some of the stories that captured the attention of investors and helped to set the trend for global equity markets over the past 12 months. With the notable exception of emerging markets, it was (as of this writing) a year of impressive gains for most major stock markets, particularly in light of what has been a persistently sluggish economic backdrop.
As I looked back over a year of tweets and blog posts, one theme was perennial: we cannot escape ourselves. What do I mean by that? Behavioral biases inform our investment decisions, regardless of gender, season, or geography.
Completing another lap around the sun is always a good excuse for reviewing the past to identify previously invisible trends, as well as to examine which stories you thought were important that turn out not to be important. What follows is my “Best of 2013” stories, all distilled from my more than 2,000 tweets.