Endowment Sweepstakes: How Tiny Houghton College Beat Harvard - The New York Times:
"Compare the results with those of Houghton College, a liberal arts institution affiliated with the Wesleyan Church in the Genesee Valley in western New York. Houghton has just over a thousand students and an endowment of $46.4 million. Houghton emerged in the top quartile of all endowments, according to Nacubo, with a return of 11.85 percent for the year ended Sept. 30. (Houghton uses a different fiscal year.) For the calendar year, the results were also impressive, at 7.54 percent. Houghton has been able to lower its spending rate — the amount it withdraws each year to fund operations — to an enviable 4.5 percent, and may be able to lower it further, to 4 percent. How did tiny Houghton do it? The answer is pretty simple: Houghton got out of hedge funds and all alternative investments a year and a half ago, and moved the entire portfolio to a mix of low-cost index funds and mutual funds at the fund giant Vanguard."
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An Ivy League professor who spent 4 months working in a South Bronx check-cashing store says we're getting it all wrong:
"The three common reasons customers cited for using a check casher over a bank: cost, transparency, and service. Lisa Servon couldn't kick the nagging feeling that the financial elite had it all wrong. The prevailing wisdom from bankers and policy makers went like this: People who used alternative financial services — like check cashers and payday lenders — were making expensive and unwise decisions. If we could just educate the "unbanked" and "underbanked" and usher them into the modern financial system with a bank account, their fortunes would surely improve. But Servon, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania and former dean at the New School, had spent 20 years studying low-income communities, and that picture didn't add up. Most of the unbanked, the roughly 7% of US households without checking or savings accounts, and the underbanked, the nearly 20% that had such accounts but still used alternative financial services, that she encountered were neither naive nor irresponsible about money. "
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ASU Professor Debunks Stock-Market Myth | KJZZ: "The so-called “Weekend Effect” refers to the tendency of stock returns to be significantly lower on Mondays than the preceding Fridays. Some theories point to companies releasing bad news after the markets close on Fridays, leading to lower prices on Monday, but new research reveals the “Weekend Effect” hasn’t existed for years.
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