via GIPHY Here’s my monthly roundup of the best interest rates on cash as of October 2021, roughly sorted from shortest to longest maturities. I look for lesser-known opportunities earning at least double what most savings accounts and money market funds are earning while still keeping your principal FDIC-insured or equivalent. Check out my Ultimate Rate-Chaser Calculator to see how much extra interest you’d earn by moving money between accounts. Rates listed are available to everyone nationwide. Rates checked as of 10/6/2021. Fintech accounts Available only to individual investors, fintech companies often pay higher-than-market rates in order to achieve fast short-term growth (often using venture capital). I define “fintech” as a software layer on top of a different bank’s… [Read More...]

Here’s a follow-up to my post about the return gap of retail investors due to poor timing. For every seller of a stock share, there is a buyer. Therefore, if the timing of retail investors is reliably a little worse than average, we also know that someone else is on the other side of all those trades. Is there a group of non-retail investors that is reliably making money off the “dumb money” trades of retail investors? Larry Swedroe digs into this question in his Advisor Perspectives article The Suckers at the Investment Table: New research confirms that institutional investors, such as mutual funds, outperform the market before fees, and they do so at the expense of retail investors. That is bad news… [Read More...]

There are many ways to access real estate as an asset class – publicly-traded REITs like Realty Income, diversified REIT ETFs, private funds that hold baskets of individual properties, and many new fintech varieties. This Institutional Investor article discusses a new research article comparing public REITs and closed-end private equity real estate (PERE) funds: In a new study published in the Journal of Portfolio Management’s real estate issue, authors Thomas Arnold, David Ling, and Andy Naranjo found that, when compared side-by-side, real estate investment trusts outperformed U.S. closed-end private equity real estate, or PERE, funds by 165 basis points annually. Here is another Nareit article about the study, where I noticed that the research was actually sponsored by Nareit. Here is a … [Read More...]