Finance sites

I just watched " Money Monster ".   It's a thriller staring George Clooney and Julia Roberts that's basically a mashup of Jim Cramer meets the flash crash meets (fill in your evil corporation here). The movie is OK, if you don't know much about finance.   However, if you do happen to know a little bit about how markets actually work, you'll be cringing all the way through. The basic plot:  Clooney is a TV star (a la Cramer) who runs a stock picking show.  Roberts is his producer.  At some point Clooney had recommended a stock (in an evil corporation called IBIS) and said it was as safe as a savings account ( sound familiar? ).  Some guy looses his savings in this stock and comes to the studio and takes Clooney hostage.   Drama ensues until there is a showdown with the evil corp CEO who admits defrauding the stockholders.   The hapless investor gets shot by the the police, and Clooney suffers a bad bout of Stockholm Syndrome . Here's what drove ...

On a recent episode of  NC SPIN , the topic was pension fund fees.   I was quoted at the start of the segment.  The video is here:  The bit about the pension fund starts at 17:37. While the discussion was pretty good and I am glad to see that the fees are getting more and more attention, there were a few comments that I think need addressing. 1. John Hood talks about the idea that if everyone indexed, markets wouldn't be efficiently priced anymore.   While in theory, this is correct as no one would trade on actual information, in reality it would never happen, simply because, as prices got out of whack, investors would have the incentive to pile back in to active investing.  But Hood does emphasize that we need to reduce costs. 2. I think that this focus on getting higher returns is a fool's errand.   This notion that there are good returns out there and that all we need to do is find them is pretty silly.   This might seem counter-intuitive, but ...