Wesley Gray: "DIY Financial Advisor" | Talks at Google

Wesley Gray will discuss his book "DIY Financial Advisor". He believes today’s financial advice is too opaque, which lead him to write his book, aiming to make investing more transparent and evidence based. Gray is a former Marine Officer (Iraq combat vet), who holds a Ph.D. in Finance from the University of Chicago. He has written three books, and was a finance professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA.

Comments

1. 1:19:21 the moment he realized he shouldn't have mentioned Yahoo! finance while giving a speech at Google LMAO !
2. Value investing, Growth investing, etc.
   How come no one talk about protecting a portfolio with stop loses. The predominant mentality is to buy and hold. I don't see many studies on buy and sell when things are not ok.
   
   Value investing will never give you big winners like Google, Amazon, FB, Netflix.
   A momentum strategy could give an investor access to those big winners with the protection of a stop lost.
3. The crowd looks a little thin, but this is a good talk. However, there are 3295 views and if you consider this talk a lecture by a professor, one recording would equal 65 class days or about an entire semester. The future of schooling is youtube videos.
4. But investment advisors have the same behavioral biases as regular investors do. If you're worried about being tempted to sell out of stocks during a severe bear market, then your portfolio probably has too much risk.
   
   And in any case, you should have an investment policy statement, which states what your target asset allocation is, specifies how much your portfolio can deviate from its target before you act (e.g. "when actual stock allocation is 5% different from its target"), and then specify what actions you'll take.
   
   You can't predict the direction of the market (no one can), but who cares? The only tool you need is a spreadsheet, which shows you the composition of your portfolio. If the relative weighting of your assets gets out of whack, then just contribute to the underperforming asset. Simple.
5. Yis!