Finance

Putnam Coes ’94 of Paulson & Co. says that starting a new fund is harder than ever.

Once you start pulling at the strands, the intertwined political and financial systems can prove very difficult to separate. A panel of financial veterans at Yale SOM’s Future of Finance conference considered recent government interventions in markets across a number of countries, and what they mean for investors.

Andrea Frazzini, a principal at research-oriented hedge fund AQR Capital Management, discusses what it takes to put an academic idea to work creating investment advantage.

In a New York Times op-ed, Robert J. Shiller explains why the housing market “is far less rational than even the often irrational stock market.”

The financial singularity, a hypothetical state in which powerful computers direct all investment decisions and financial markets become perfect, will never become reality, according to Robert Shiller.

Sandra Urie ’85 of Cambridge Associates talks about helping clients find the right level of risk.

The concept of high-risk, high-return is a bedrock belief in finance, confirmed by decades of empirical data. But when Prof. Roger Ibbotson dug deeper into the data, things started to look a little different.

Investment companies including Fidelity, Putnam Investments, and Voya Financial are rolling out tools that tell investors how their retirement savings compare to those of their peers. This social comparison is intended to motivate investors to increase their savings; however, new research shows that it can have the opposite effect.

The choices we make—the cars we drive, the neighborhoods we live in, the gyms we join—are influenced by our social networks, the people we surround ourselves with. Our financial choices are no exception. While thousands of studies have examined peer effects, a new study co-authored by Florian Ederer, assistant professor of economics, is the first to clearly identify the two channels of social influence—social learning and social utility—that explain why our peers’ financial decisions affect our own.

Smart beta is the hot thing in investing strategies, marketed as a new way to diversify and reduce risk. But Eugene Podkaminer ’01 argues that common smart beta strategies recycle long-established methods and likely aren’t the most efficient way to achieve those goals.