How’s your billion dollar bracket doing?

You’ve likely heard about Warren Buffett’s recent NCAA basketball tournament challenge: build the perfect NCAA bracket and you could win $1 billion. Some may think Warren is crazy, but he knows that the odds of picking the perfect bracket are similar to that of picking the next great stock or fund manger—not good.

While it might be fun to wager $20 and watch the games, managing your money is far from a game. Just as Warren used the evidence to make this safe bet (there are 9.2 quintillion different potential bracket combinations), we also use the evidence to keep the odds on your side when investing.

What’s the latest on the challenge? It was over after the second day of play. Read more about the results here.

Last month in the New York Times, Sam Polk offered a refreshing first-hand account from the underbelly of Wall Street. Polk is a former Wall Street trader who lived the excessive life that Hollywood often shows hedge fund managers and investment bankers living (see: The Wolf of Wall Street). Eventually, he did something that a lot of people would find difficult: he gave up his money addiction in search of something better. This article struck me as a great reminder that having the most money isn’t what life is about, and even if you do have financial freedom it doesn’t guarantee happiness. That’s why at Hill Investment Group we’re passionate about helping to refocus on the things that are truly important; life is too short to worry about the rest.

Read the article here.

Matt Hall was quoted in a January 5th article by business reporter Jim Gallagher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Jim discusses floating rate funds and how they perform in different market environments. As Matt notes in the article, floating rate funds aren’t a wise investment because they “fare much worse than investment-grade bond funds in bad times, but they don’t have the upside gains of the stock market in good times.”