Peridot Capitalist

If you have read about my investment philosophy on peridotcapital.com you will see that I refer to Bill Miller (manager of Legg Mason Value Trust) in comparing my value strategy to others that are more well known than myself. Miller looks at the market differently than most, and I use many of the same techniques [...]

In a perfect world, stock brokers would actually earn their money. If they recommend individual stocks to their clients, those stocks would do better than the ones chimpanzees choose by throwing darts at the Wall Street Journal stock tables. If they recommend mutual funds to their clients, those mutual funds would be above-average performers. After [...]

From the Associated Press: “A survey by J.D. Power and Associates found that brokerage Edward Jones was consumers’ choice as the best full-service investment adviser for a second straight year. J.D. Power, a marketing firm that’s part of The McGraw-Hill Cos., asked investors to evaluate full-service brokers on seven criteria, including competitiveness of portfolio, account [...]

In the latest example of how mutual fund companies couldn’t care less about their long suffering shareholders, consider Fidelity’s recent announcement that it will be recommending its Blue Chip Growth Fund (FBGRX) change its benchmark from the S&P 500 index to the Russell 1000 Growth index. As soon as I read about the proposal I [...]

I had to double check to make sure what I heard over the weekend was correct. A.G. Edwards (AGE), a St. Louis based firm with 7,000 brokers nationwide, is planning to raise their commissions by 5 percent beginning on March 15th. In addition, their postage and handling fee is jumping 10 percent to $5.50 per [...]