The meltdown of Basis Capital has highlighted the need for much greater clarity of communication from research houses – particularly when it comes to describing product risk. With the benefit of hindsight, it is fun to look back and see what the research houses were saying about the risk of the Basis Capital Yield fund before the event. We see nothing on the two pieces of information that really matter...

Many planners still use long term historical returns to estimate future market returns on the basis that, if the historical period is long enough, everything smoothes out. This is pure bunk. In order to demonstrate this as conclusively as possible, we illustrate the impact of using 20 year historical returns as forecasts for the subsequent decade across six major equity markets over the past 107 years...

Near the end of each decade, a bubble seems to emerge in financial markets...

The last six weeks, the markets have been something of a rollercoaster ride. Because the farrelly’s forecast methodology changes as markets go up and down, so too have the forecasts been jumping up and down. Now, it goes without saying that the last thing that you want to be doing is using a strategy that flip flops from one extreme to another in the space of a few weeks. So what do we do? Difficult or not, strategies are still required...

Not all rules of thumb make sense, and one of the sillier ones in this industry is the way it labels assets as either growth or income…

I'm not sure we got an answer to the question "Should international equities be actively or passively managed?" - at the last Portfolio Construction Forum Researchers' Roundtable meeting of 2003...

When all was said and done, five key points came through clearly from the first topic - how much to international equities in 2004? - at the last Researchers' Roundtable meeting of 2003...