Fraud and cybercrime are serious threats—but you can take practical steps to protect your identity and assets.

You can also have an impact on safeguarding your information and assets by following these guidelines and applying caution when sharing information and executing transactions. This checklist summarizes common cyber fraud tactics, along with tips, best practices, and actions to take if you suspect a breach.

Investors often chase attention-grabbing stocks and severely underperform the market due to active trading.

By Larry Swedroe | Feb 14, 2023

Research has found that retail investors tend to be naive “noise traders” who trade on sentiment rather than on fundamentals.

In a series of papers, Brad Barber and Terrance Odean demonstrated that retail investors are susceptible to behavioral biases such as overconfidence, often chase attention-grabbing stocks, and severely underperform the market due to active trading.

Hedge funds are investment pools that are relatively unconstrained in what they do. They are relatively unregulated (for now), charge very high fees, will not necessarily give you your money back when you want it, and will generally not tell you what they do. They are supposed to make money all the time, and when they fail at this, their investors redeem and go to someone else who has recently been making money. Every three or four years they deliver a one-in-a-hundred-year flood. They are generally run for rich people in Geneva, Switzerland, by rich people in Greenwich, Connecticut. – Cliff Asness

Behavioral economists have provided us with many examples of anomalies in investor behavior, such as a preference for investments with lottery-like distribution despite their very poor historical returns. But the greatest anomaly is that despite decades of poor performance and the failure to effectively hedge exposure to conventional security classes, assets under management among hedge funds have grown from about $300 billion 25 years ago to about $5 trillion today.

After years of U.S. stocks besting international markets (and more of the same so far in 2022), investing internationally seems to have a bad rap among many U.S. investors. We explore and debunk three “myths” to show why we think international stocks should hold a place in most long-term portfolios.

Myth #1: Global diversification doesn't work anymore. 

It’s no secret that U.S. stocks have had the upper hand on international markets for years —since around the start of the prior decade. To date, 2022 has been no different. The combined effect of U.S. stocks’ better performance and the strength of the US dollar drove the disappointing performance of international stocks. After what might feel like a very long period of U.S. market dominance, it’s fair for investors to wonder why they should bother investing both at home and abroad. To illustrate the value of global diversification at work, in Figure 1, we present rolling three-year returns for U.S., non-U.S. (developed and emerging), and global stocks from December 1990 through October 2022.

The dotted line represents global stocks. Whether U.S. or non-U.S. stocks have outperformed over any period, global stocks are always somewhere in the middle —neither the highest nor the lowest. This highlights the benefit of diversification for those that invest across global markets. Investors may avoid some potential downside in exchange for giving up some potential upside.