Tag Archives: Performance
Evaluation in Organizations: A Systematic Approach to Enhancing Learning, Performance, and Change Reviews
Evaluation in Organizations: A Systematic Approach to Enhancing Learning, Performance, and Change
From new product launches to large-scale training initiatives, organizations need the tools to measure the effectiveness of their programs, processes, and systems. In Evaluation in Organizations, learning theory experts Darlene Russ-Eft and Hallie Preskill integrate the most current research with practical applications to provide a fully revised new edition of this essential resource for managers, human resource professionals, students, and teachers.
EFT for Sports Performance
EFT for Sports Performance
- ISBN13: 9781604150520
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Turbocharge your sports performance with EFT! The founder of EFT, Stanford-trained engineer and former star football player Gary Craig, shows you how. EFT has been used by thousands of athletes to improve their performance, from Olympic stars to Little League baseball players. Scientific studies have demonstrated that athletes can achieve enormous performance gains after just a few minutes of EFT.In this authoritative book, Gary Craig shows how to eliminate the limiting beliefs that hold you bac
Top 3 Reasons Chasing Past Mutual Fund Performance Can Hurt Your Net Worth
After writing about ways to improve your mutual fund performance, it occurred to me I hadn’t really gotten into the reasons that chasing past mutual fund performance can be such a terrible idea, leaving you with catastrophic losses. Many new investors have no idea that mutual funds can change portfolio managers, that the difficulty of finding good returning investments increases as the total assets under management level rises, and that many “good” mutual funds weren’t, in fact, good but instead rode the wave of a price bubble, such as dot-com stocks, real estate stocks, the “Nifty Fifty” or electric utilities. It seems as if every decade, a new type of company is en vogue and investors forget that it doesn’t matter if $ 1 of profit comes from sewage treatment plants or high-tech darlings, your return depends upon how much you pay for that dollar.
Honestly, I think the best option for most new investors – not all, but most – is to buy a low-cost index fund, regularly add money by having a steady amount taken out of a bank account, reinvest dividends, and hold it all through a tax-advantaged account. It may be boring. It may seem pathetically simple. But history has shown it works. Most strategies used by most new investors don’t. Just look at the data compiled by mutual fund research giant Morningstar, which showed that most investors earned only 2% to 3% on their money, while the funds they owned in their portfolios returned 9% to 10%. Why? The investors kept changing their minds, putting money in one hot fund then taking it out, transferring assets here, then moving them back over there. You can’t do that and get ahead. You just can’t do it.
It seems like for every investor that held a blue chip stock, such as Procter & Gamble, over the past 20 years, turning $ 100,000 into $ 1,200,000 with cash dividends, exponentially more attempted to trade the stock. They rented pieces of paper instead of owned businesses. That is, they hoped to profit off of other investors’ mistakes instead of the underlying earnings of the company in which they had an ownership stake.
This whole investing thing is incredibly easy once you have a successful enough career that your family is earning enough spare cash to pay your bills and have a little something left over at the end of the month. I know of a few doctors who lived middle class lifestyles and retired with $ 15 million to $ 20 million as a result of good stewardship, living below their means, and staying the course.
Why Do Investors Accept Poor Mutual Fund Performance?
Keeping on the same theme of the month, mutual fund performance, I wanted to address a question some of you have been asking. Namely, “Why would anyone accept poor mutual fund performance if they don’t have to do so?”. It comes down to four, key reasons:
- Not knowing what a mutual fund is
- Not knowing which types of investments a mutual fund owns
- Not knowing the benchmark to which to compare a mutual fund
- Not knowing there are less expensive mutual fund options
A completely inexperienced investor who can’t tell you the difference between a dividend and debenture is going to be lost when it comes time to put together a portfolio of high quality mutual funds. That is why it is so vital to educate yourself.
To help expand on these mistakes, I wrote a new article called Top 4 Reasons Investors Accept Poor Mutual Fund Performance. Why am I so passionate about the topic? Because every penny you give up to banks, brokers, and other expenses is not a penny lost. It’s more than that. You also lose all of the pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and dollars that the penny could have produced if invested long enough and allowed to compound.
Improving Mutual Fund Performance Is Fairly Simple
A few hours ago, I sat down and began writing a list of tips to improve mutual fund performance for new investors who wanted to know how to squeeze a couple of extra percentage points of return out of their holdings. The remarkable thing was, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the secret lies in cutting costs so that more of the money in your investments stays in your family’s pocket instead of going to banks, stock brokers, mutual fund management companies, sales commission loads, and other “frictional” expenses. The difference in mutual fund performance between a high cost fund and a low cost fund is staggering over a long time period of 20+ years.
Why don’t most new investors know this? That is easy. They can’t even answer the question, “What Is a Mutual Fund?” so how on earth are they going to know what a mutual fund expense ratio is? Instead, they are likely to look at the literature sent out by the fund management company, peruse the charts in the glossy-paged sales literature, and go with the fund that has the best name or best track record, even though countless empirical studies have shown that past performance is no guarantee of future results. It is the nature of the industry now that pensions have gone by the wayside and there are easy fees to be made. It is the incentive system our society has set for the money management game.
Don’t misunderstand me. Sometimes, a fixed fee of, say, 1% or 2% can be useful if you have an investor who otherwise would destroy their family’s net worth through frequent trading, irrational concentration in specific stocks or asset classes, or just poor decision making. In such a situation, the steady hand of an experienced portfolio manager can add enormous value that far exceeds the cost of his or her fee even though such as fee must, by definition, lower mutual fund performance.
For example, I once heard a story of a young man who a decade ago lost a $ 5 million inheritance trading derivatives and options. He now works as a waiter for minimum wage. Surely, a $ 50,000 or $ 100,000 fee on his holdings each year (again, 1% to 2%) would have been an enormous bargain compared to the total loss of his capital. He could have been sitting at home or pursuing his passion, collecting $ 175,000 per year in cash dividends. But he lost everything, chasing after a little better performance. It’s asinine. Totally asinine and unnecessary.
