Valuation Frequency in Direct Real Estate: When More Frequent Isn’t More Informative
In direct real estate, a more frequently updated valuation can look more precise without actually being more informative.
Finance
Larry’s Substack.
Larry Swedroe on investing, markets, and economic evidence.
Recent essays
30 of 56The CAPE That Cried Wolf: Has the Standard Market-Valuation Metric Broken Down?
For decades, the Cyclically Adjusted Price-Earnings (CAPE) ratio—pioneered by Nobel laureate Robert Shiller—has been the gold standard for evaluating equity market valuations.
Private Markets Have a Diversification Problem. Can CFOs Help Investors Manage Risk? Collateralized fund obligations may offer a more efficient way to reshape private market risk.
Private markets have transformed from a niche corner of institutional finance into a core portfolio allocation.
The Wrapper Illusion Can an LLC or partnership make tax anti-abuse rules disappear?
A June 16, 2026 article from AQR tackled a question that comes up more often than you’d think among sophisticated investors: if you hold a long position in your personal brokerage account and simultaneously short the identical position through a partnership yo…
How Much Public Debt Is Too Much? A New Model Puts a Number on the “Sovereign Risk Channel”
The dangers associated with high public debt are well-documented in economic literature.
Two Accounting Anomalies: One May Be Risk, the Other Is Mispricing
Two of the longest-running puzzles in accounting and asset pricing research are the accrual anomaly and the post-earnings-announcement drift, or PEAD.
The Seven Sins of Active Fund Management
A Substack subscriber asked that I write up Montier’s Seven Sins of Fund Management.
The Seven Sins of Quantitative Investing: Lessons from Deutsche Bank’s Quant Handbook
A Substack subscriber asked that I write up this paper.
The Value Bridge Problem
Why Private Equity’s Favorite Performance Metric Doesn’t Hold Up
Sorting Gold from Gravel: What One Researcher Found When She Put AI Sentiment Models to the Test
Every night, a financial news pipeline quietly ingests nearly thousands of news articles tagged across the nine industry sectors and S&P 500.
Private Credit’s Convergent Faults: A Warning the Market Is Not Pricing
A June 2026 research paper from CrossVol Research — “Convergent Faults: A Quantitative Forensic of Private Credit’s Synchronized Systemic Risk” — makes a case that deserves attention from anyone with exposure to private credit, whether as an investor, an advis…
When the Insiders and the News Disagree
Most investors encounter two kinds of information about a stock: what insiders are doing with their own money, and what the financial press is saying.
What Risk Are Investors Actually Being Compensated to Bear? The Answer Isn’t Volatility
New research finds that extreme downside shocks to future consumption drive the equity risk premium. Those who cannot tolerate the discomfort are the ones who pay for it.
Why Shorting Works Best Alongside Longs
A standalone short book is structurally disadvantaged.
Private Ratings, Hidden Risks: How Life Insurers Are Gaming the Credit Rating System
Xuelin Li, Sangmin Oh, and Giacomo Ricciardi, authors of the June 2026 study “Rating Without Market Discipline” — deliver an empirical indictment of private credit ratings in the insurance sector.
The Performance of Public Versus Private Real Estate
My May 29, 2026 Substack column, “What Do We Actually Know About Private Fund Performance?
AI Meets DIY: When Humans Meddle with AI Investing Tools
A new academic study finds that investor intervention often reduces the quality of AI-generated portfolio recommendations.
Are Investors Being Paid to Bear Crash Risk in Individual Stocks?
Over the past century, the U.S.
Second Quarter 2026 Economic and Market Outlook
The major headline news is that even before the cessation of fighting with Iran, the U.S.
What History Tells Us About The AI Investment Boom
My friend Kai Wu, host of “The Intangible Economy” podcast and manager of Sparkline Capital’s Intangible Value ETFs ITAN and DTAN, interviewed financial historian Edward Chancellor, who has spent a career studying speculative manias.
What Does Private Credit Risk Actually Look Like?
The Data Says Less Than the Headlines Suggest
Semi-Liquid Private Credit Funds: Liquidity Promises, Liquidity Strains
Private credit has moved from niche to mainstream, and with that growth has come a less glamorous but increasingly important question: what happens when a fund promises investors periodic liquidity while holding assets that are inherently hard to sell?
Do Economic Moats Beat the Market?
What Buffett gets right—and what investors miss
The Forecasting Fix That Wall Street Missed
CAPE and price/dividend look broken, but new research shows they’ve been misread. Here are 5 takeaways for investors.
Is the Stock Market Actually in a Bubble? A New Way to Measure It
It’s easy to say prices went down, so it must have been a bubble, after the fact.
Is Private Credit Actually Calm, or Just Slow to Tell You It Isn’t?
Are private credit valuations based on quarterly appraisals creating a structural lag between market conditions and reported performance?
Active Management’s Persistent Failure: A 2025 Perspective
Charles Ellis’s classic work, Winning the Loser’s Game—first published as a book in 1985, building on his landmark 1975 Financial Analysts Journal article— highlighted a sobering reality for investors: only about 20% of actively managed funds—those attempting…
Gaming the IPO Window
New academic research reveals that private companies time their public listings to exploit temporary mispricings in comparable public stocks.
Gambling Away Your Future: What a New Study Reveals About Sports Betting and Your Finances
Legal sports betting in the U.S.
The Volatility Inversion: A Warning Sign Hiding in Plain Sight
Since the Iran ceasefire, equity markets have surged, with most attention focused on semiconductors and AI names.