due dligence
Norb Vonnegut culls three lessons from HBO's recent Bernie Madoff biopic. Taken together, they serve as a renewed prompt for investors to consider low-cost index funds. After all, these funds are hardly exclusive. The world is vetting them constantly. So long as investors reinvest dividends and other cash flows back into the funds, the annualized returns are a real measure of investment performance: What you see is what you get. And what’s better than that?
Research analysts must rethink due diligence and manager selection, says Tom Brakke, CFA. Performance chasing doesn't work, and at the end of the day, an analyst's job is to crack the corporate narrative and tie the "what" to the "how." The best due diligence, Brakke says, is "field work."
The benefits of meditation are well-known and have been espoused by some of the world's most successful investors and innovators. Indeed, even business schools are starting to include meditation in their curricula.
Tom Brakke, CFA, states that good research, good due diligence in general, means looking for differential information and approaching the problem in different ways.