Blog & Articles

I wanted to get out. More than anything, I wanted to get out. It’s not that I had it bad. I had it pretty good, if I’m being honest. Better than I deserved. But still, I wanted to get out. The dust was settling on the global financial crisis and…

One of my professional mentors and heroes beat cancer this year. After months of uncertainty, painful treatments and indescribable fear, he emerged with a clean bill of health. When he called me with the news he told me that the experience has transformed his outlook on life. “It’s funny, but…

Detroit is a tough town. The weather is tough, the people are tough, the sky is grey for eight months out of each year. I didn’t grow up in Detroit so there are things I notice as an outsider. Like the fact that everyone starts work early in Detroit. They…

The most valuable skill an investor can acquire is the ability to distinguish theory from law. Examples of theory include forecasts, the relationship between gold and inflation, or anything ever written by an economist. Examples of law include principles of diversification, statistical arbitrage, and mostly, the fact that anything good that…

If you look up the word exemptive in the Oxford Dictionary, you won’t find any results. The word “exemptive”, it turns out, is actually not a word at all. ETFs have been primarily governed by the Investment Company Act of 1940, which is essentially a rule designed for mutual funds….

Always be sure to do your homework on companies, ETFs and various investing strategies. Don’t chase the fads. The most shocking thing about the collapse of Theranos is that people are shocked. Well, I suppose that isn’t fair. The story is shocking, without a doubt. As detailed in John Carreyrou’s new book,…

I should have known because we stopped sending press releases. This was back, I don’t know, 2012 or so. I was working at the New York Stock Exchange and my clients were ETF issuers. My job was to move the ball forward on market structure initiatives, help issuers get product…

It’s not every day asset management firms advocate for the right to pay new service fees. Yet that is exactly what we are doing. Recently, FINRA put out a request for the ETF industry to comment on lifting Rule 5250 — a rule put in place long before ETFs were…

The exchange-traded-fund industry is being shaped by a new paradigm — not active vs. passive. It was the image of dart-throwing monkeys that got me. I would like to think it was the analytics, the white papers or even the raw performance data of active managers over the years. But…