Sublime

I'd seen enough hitting behind the ball. By playing it safe, you can make a portfolio so pablum-like that you don't get any sizzle. You can diversify yourself into mediocrity. This sounds like heresy to many advocates of modern portfolio theory, but sticking our neck out worked for Windsor.I

Toward a rediscovery of risk

Good times breed laxity, laxity breeds unreliable numbers, and ultimately, unreliable numbers bring about bad times. This simple rhythm of markets is as predictable as human avarice.

Derivatives: A Story of Financial and Environmental Innovation

A moral hazard exists when organizations and individuals are not required to bear the negative consequences of their failures.

At the time of writing, pension funds and insurance companies in the United States and in Europe somehow bought the argument that “in the long term equities always pay off 9%” and back it up with statistics. The statistics are right, but they are past history. My argument is that I can find you a security somewhere among the 40,000 available that w

Yet our modern monetary mandarins never stop to consider Bagehot’s warnings about the adverse consequences of easy money – how interest rates set at 2 per cent or less fuel speculative manias, drive savers to make risky investments, encourage bad lending and weaken the financial system. One wonders whether any of them has actually opened the pages

One of our favorite CEF managers is Scott Page. He’s been with Eaton Vance, one of the oldest investment management firms in the US, since 1989. He has conducted the Eaton Vance Floating-Rate Income Trust (EFT, not to be confused with ETF, an exchange-traded fund) brilliantly since inception—through rising and falling rate cycles, through rising an