Elm in the Press

October 24, 2024 — Vanguard founder John Bogle‘s “cost matters hypothesis” (CMH) was based on the mathematical truth that the sum of all active portfolios equals the market portfolio. From this it follows that the average return on all active portfolios must equal the market return, minus the fees charged by active investment managers. This may have been the single most powerful argument driving the relentless growth of indexing over the past 30 years. However, now that trading and

October 14, 2024 — It sounds like an investor’s wildest dream. A surprising experiment shows that it shouldn’t be. Huge sums are lavished each year on Wall Street economists and strategists asked to gaze into their crystal balls ahead of market-moving economic numbers. When they mostly get it wrong and there is a surprise, the news is big enough to make front-page news in the next day’s print edition of The Wall Street Journal. But what if a trader

September 27, 2024 — If investors had known in advance the size of the Federal Reserve’s latest interest-rate cut, would they have made big money on stocks and bonds trading on this market-moving intel? Surprisingly, the answer appears to be a resounding no, at least when it comes to amateur traders and their ilk, according to a recent study from Elm Partners Management’s Victor Haghani and James White.

September 26, 2024 — Buy the rumour, sell the news, goes the saying. But how much money could you make betting on stocks and bonds if you really did have tomorrow’s headlines, today? Inspired by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s conjecture that even blessed with a crystal ball, most investors would quickly go bust, a fun paper published this week by Victor Haghani (formerly a partner of Long-Term Capital Management) and James White (chief executive of Haghani’s Elm Partners) sought to

September 26, 2024 — Nobody in the world wants yesterday’s papers. Within 24 hours, they’re no use for anything more than wrapping fish and chips. But tomorrow’s papers are no more useful if you’re playing the stock market. In the short run, knowledge of the next day’s news doesn’t help you make money.

June 18, 2024 — This is an interview with Victor Haghani who is among many other things… the Co-Founder of LTCM (long term capital management), the Founder of Elm Wealth and the author of Missing Billionaires. In this interview we focused on Victor himself... his experiences at Solomon in the 80s and a brush with Bill Browder (who by the way was recently knighted), comments on Jim Simons and Nassim Taleb, an incredible moment of serendipity that would have changed

May 11, 2024 — The key to long-term investment success is being as conservative as possible. That’s just the opposite of what most investment professionals advise. They contend that taking on more risk is more lucrative over a long time horizon. Meanwhile, long-term performance rankings consistently show that advisers who incur the greatest risk often land near the bottom of the pack.

May 8, 2024 — Victor Haghani has been selected for inclusion in Marquis Who's Who. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.

April 24, 2024 — Victor Haghani wants to talk about what he calls the “risk matters hypothesis”. It’s a project he describes as his most exciting in years, even though others, he says, might consider it a statement of the obvious.

April 23, 2024 — Why investment sizing is an important - yet often overlooked - factor in investor outcomes.

April 22, 2024 — In Episode 360 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Victor Haghani about his book “The Missing Billionaires” and what a growing body of literature has to say about sensible wealth management and how to invest for the long term. Haghani started his career at Salomon Brothers in 1984, where he became a Managing Director in the bond-arbitrage group, and in 1993, he was a co-founding partner of Long-Term Capital Management. He founded Elm Wealth

April 12, 2024 — Today the authors are principals at Elm Wealth, a multibillion-dollar wealth-management practice. They argue forcefully for a broader adoption of the “Merton share,” named after the Nobel-winning economist Robert Merton: “The expected profit required from a gamble increases not with the size of the risk, but rather with the size of the risk, the authors explain.

April 9, 2024 — The stock market crash of 1929 was a pivotal event that rippled across the globe. The Great Crash rocked financial markets, not to mention the world economy, and proved to be a precursor to the Great Depression. The sudden selloff wiped out the fortunes of investors who were ill prepared to ride out a bear market. Today, investors must heed the lessons from volatile markets of the past and take stock of hidden risks that

January 8, 2024 — Co-authors Victor Haghani and James White use the Vanderbilts in their personal finance book to demonstrate how (remarkably) few billionaires today are heirs of old money.

December 20, 2023 — Haghani’s book, “The Missing Billionaires: A Guide to Better Financial Decisions,” co-written with James White, was released earlier this year, and was named among the best books of 2023 by The Economist. The book draws upon Haghani’s decades of experience in the world of finance, from managing a Wall Street hedge fund to advising investors in low-cost index funds, or, as Haghani put it, “instead of trying to beat the market, just trying to get

December 11, 2023 — Why are there not more billionaires today? That is the provocative question posed by the new book “The Missing Billionaires: A Guide to Better Financial Decisions” by Victor Haghani and James White. According to the book, there were enough US millionaires in the year 1900 to have generated as many as 16,000 billionaires today. In fact, it is hard to identify any billionaires today whose fortune traces back to before the 20th century.

November 29, 2023 — Financial “wisdom” is said to be cyclical rather than cumulative, but that’s unfair. At least in the dominion of portfolio management and design, academics and money managers have made great strides in decoding Mr. Market’s cryptic signals over the past half century. The challenge, having led the proverbial horse to water, is making him drink. The stakes are high. History, in fact, suggests that missed opportunity costs are immense, notes “The Missing Billionaires: A Guide to

November 24, 2023 — Victor Haghani and James White are co-authors of "The Missing Billionaires, A Guide to Better Financial Decisions." Victor is also the founder and CIO of Elm Wealth and David is the CEO, where they implement these concepts for their clients. This fascinating book discusses investment decision-making and risk-sizing and how to make better financial decisions with your wealth.

November 10, 2023 — Victor Haghani is co-author of the book The Missing Billionaires: A Guide to Better Financial Decisions. Haghani started his career in 1984 at Salomon Bros., where he became a managing director in the bond arbitrage group run by John Meriwether. In 1993 he was a co-founding partner of Long-Term Capital Management, and in 2011 he founded Elm Wealth to help clients, including his own family, manage and preserve their wealth.

October 31, 2023 — The Missing Billionaires by Victor Haghani and James White explains what happened to the wealth of prior financial titans. Discover investing secrets from the Missing Billionaires, and how you can benefit.

October 16, 2023 — In Episode 16 of The Investing Show, we feature an insightful interview with Victor Haghani, a former hedge fund manager who has transitioned from complex investment strategies to a simpler approach.

September 27, 2023 — Since Long-Term Capital Management’s collapse 25 years ago this month, the story of the hedge fund’s fall from grace continues to echo through markets and the financial world. LTCM’s trading decisions and the personalities involved have been amply discussed in multiple books, articles and even business school case studies. But one question merits more discussion: how should an LTCM partner, for example myself, have decided how much to invest in the fund we managed?

September 22, 2023 — Twenty-five years is a long time to think about the consequences of your involvement in one of Wall Street’s most infamous bailouts. Victor Haghani, co-founder of Long-Term Capital Management, has come to believe that a better understanding of his personal risk would’ve helped the hedge fund balance its own dangers.

September 21, 2023 — If you ever hear a professional investor talk about a trade that taught them a lot, prick up your ears. Usually, this is code for “a time I lost an absolutely colossal amount of money”, and you are in for one of the better stories about how finance works at the coalface.

September 14, 2023 — If the wealthiest families of the past century spent a reasonable amount of their wealth, invested in the stock market, and paid taxes, there would be thousands of billionaires today. But there aren’t. So, what happened? To answer this question, we are joined by authors and finance professionals, Victor Haghani and James White.