
Money Life with Chuck Jaffe Research Affiliates' Arnott: Investors lose billions to bad indexing
Rob Arnott, founding chairman at Research Affiliates, says that classic index instruction has investors buying stocks after they get hot, dropping stocks after losses have occurred and missing out on several percentage points of return in the process. Arnott says the largest stocks earn their place in the index, but that the stocks that move into or out of an index — a process that is actively managed with the most-famous indexes — is where the trouble happens. As for the personal indexes that are arising these days, Arnott says that, in general, you'd be better off letting a cat pick the stocks for you.
Olivia Valdes, senior researcher at the FINRA Foundation, discusses their research which shows that consumers and investors are vulnerable to fraud because more than half of them don't recognize the common signs that someone is trying to pull a scam.
Plus, Chuck talks about how to calculate the expected value of a bet after a listener raises questions about the lottery option on his Halloween cash-or-candy game, and whether giving kids a second chance — the new twist Chuck is adding this year — doubles the odds of winning.
