Last week I had an "a ha" moment when during a meeting, discussion turned to the meaning of the term "plan sponsor." I always considered it a broad expression, that refers to institutional clients (e.g., pension funds, endowments, foundations). But at least one of the...
Performance Perspectives Blog
Thoughts on performance measurement from David Spaulding and other members of our team.
Terminology: Plan Sponsor
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Words and their meanings
"Definitions would be good things if we did not use words to make them" J. Rousseau Our industry is replete with words, expressions, and abbreviations that conjure up different meanings. My son, Chris, and I were on the phone with a prospective consulting client who...
September 11 … eight years later
I think it's fitting, on this eighth anniversary of 9/11, to pause and reflect on that horrible day. There are a few events in our lives that we recall a lot of details about: some are especially wonderful, such as births and weddings, while others are tragic and so...
A poll!
I just launched a poll on Linkedin: Will the DJIA close above 10,000 by December 31. Please join in!
Global outreach
A few weeks ago I began monitoring traffic on the blog. And while I can't tell who is logging in, I can tell where they're connecting from. And so far we've been accessed from at least 23 countries: United States, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil,...
Lessons learned
"Financial crisis of past year offers many lessons," reads the CFA Institute's lead story in today's e-mail news brief. The story is from The Wall Street Journal and points out how "we are nearly six months into one of the most impressive bull markets in memory," with...
It’s not about me
This morning, while driving to the store, I happened to catch Rev.DeForest "Buster" Soaries preaching on the radio. Buster is the pastor of First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset, NJ. I know Buster and have heard him preach, both in person and on the...
Investment-Performance.com … so promising
A few years back someone began a website, investment-performance.com, to provide a variety of services, including a way to get questions answered. They asked me, along with a few others, to serve as moderators. And periodically I'd offer comments.Well, earlier this...
As the economy turns
Over the past few weeks we've seen many indicators of a turnaround for the economy at large and the market in specific. The very wide and dynamic intraday shifts in the DJIA, for example, seem to have dissipated, and bad news doesn't cause the market to nosedive as it...
Madoff: the other shoes are beginning to fall
Happy the man who meditates on wisdom,and reflects on knowledge.Sirach 15: 20.When we learned of the Madoff fraud, we knew that he couldn't have pulled it off singlehandedly; he had to have coconspirators. And this week we learned of one, who had been with him a long...