Author Archives: jcoumarianos

How bad do bonds look compared to high current yield alternatives — especially real estate related alternatives?  

REITs gone wild again? (Source: NAREIT)  

Japan is cheap. Europe and the US are not, with the possible exception of energy in the US. Stocks aren’t grossly overpriced as much as they’re fully valued. Consequently, de Vaulx is holding a healthy amount of cash. He also … Continue reading →

Price plugs this book by Peter Cundill.

From this WSJ piece: The reality is the world’s four major economies — the euro zone, the U.S., China, and Japan — are all somewhere between recession and barefly growing. Those four economies comprise more than half of the world’s … Continue reading →

Jason Zweig assesses the recent drop in stocks and bonds, and concludes that foreign stocks are cheap. They trade at cheaper book values and throw off higher yields than their domestic counterparts. Also everyone looks to the US for safety, … Continue reading →

Social Security is like one big bond, meaning target dates funds are flawed by not having enough stock exposure, according to Bogle. I think that’s somewhat controversial. You have to believe that Social Security won’t be means-tested, for example.

Barry Ritholtz has an excellent presenation on behavioral investing, which we’re posting below. In it, he discusses many of the classic behavioral pitfallts investors suffer such as recency bias, optimism bias, and wanting to be part of the crowd. However, … Continue reading →

In light of REITs’ fall, we took a measure of their valuation by calculating Price/FFO ttm for the top 15 constituents of the Vanguard REIT Index Fund (VGSIX). (FFO or funds from operations is net income adjusted for  GAAP depreciation, … Continue reading →