Thursday, August 27, 2015

a historic sell-off

By one metric, investors would have to go back 75 years to find the last time the S&P 500's losses were this abrupt.

Bespoke Investment Group observed that the S&P 500 has closed more than four standard deviations below its 50-day moving average for the third consecutive session. That's only the second time this has happened in the history of the index. May 15, 1940, marked the end of the last three-session period in which this occurred:

This string of sizable deviations from the 50-day moving average is a testament to just how severe recent losses have been compared to the index's recent range.

"Not even the crash of 1987 got this oversold relative to trend," writes Bespoke.

The money management and research firm produced a pair of analogue charts showing what's in store if the S&P 500 mimics the price action seen in mid-1940. Overlaying the axes gives the impression that the worst of the pain is behind us, and a market bottom isn't too far off:

However, indexing the S&P 500 to five sessions prior to the tumult shows that a replication of the mid-1940 plunge could see equities run much further to the downside and into a bear market:

If it tracked the 1940 trajectory, the S&P 500 would hit a low of 1,556 in relatively short order. But Bespoke doesn't think stocks are fated to repeat that selloff.

"There is nothing, nothing, we have seen - Chinese fears, positioning, valuation, or any other factor - suggests to us that we are headed to 1556," the analysts write. "More likely, in our view, is something along the lines of the top analogue; we doubt the bottom is in, but see it unlikely we enter a bear market and a true stock market crash."

Sunday, August 23, 2015

the richest who ever lived

Every year Forbes publishes the richest 500 people in the world. Bill Gates has topped that list for 16 of the past 21 years. His fortune sits at $79.2 billion dollars, which is larger than the size of Hawaii’s economy at $77.4 billion dollars in 2014!

Although Gates’ wealth is the highest today, how would he stack up against the history’s richest people? Below are history’s top 30 richest people at their peak wealth, adjusted for inflation and appreciation of their assets. You will also see the “Honorable Mention” list that shows rulers, monarchs, and emperors of countries that drew their wealth from the country they ruled.

Here are some interesting highlights for the richest people of all time, including the Honorable Mentions:

The Top 30 are worth about $5 trillion dollars! This amount is more than the size of Japan’s economy.

14 out of the 30 are Americans

None are women (for now at least!)

Only 3 are currently living but do not crack the Top 10: Bill Gates, Carlos Slim Helu, and Warren Buffett

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

destroying your ideas

“And one of the great things to learn from Darwin is the value of extreme objectivity. He tried to disconfirm his ideas as soon as he got ’em. He quickly put down in his notebook anything that disconfirmed a much-loved idea. He especially sought out such things. Well, if you keep doing that over time, you get to be a perfectly marvelous thinker instead of one more klutz repeatedly demonstrating first-conclusion bias”

-- Charlie Munger

Of all the mental models imparted by Charlie Munger (Trades, Portfolio), seeking disconfirming evidence is probably one of the hardest ones to implement due to human ego. Our tendency to justify away disconfirming evidence and to simply deny the existence of disconfirming evidence is strong, which makes actively seeking disconfirming evidence almost against human nature.

Keep in mind that the goal is not to seek disconfirming evidence for everything. You only need to seek disconfirming evidences for the most important things – the main drivers of your thesis – the factors that actually move the needle.

I’m going to end this article with another great quote from Charlie Munger (Trades, Portfolio):

"We all are learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. You must force yourself to consider arguments on the other side."

Thursday, August 06, 2015

Behavioral economics

Behavioral economics should have been a boon for active investment management. The argument for stock market efficiency and, therefore, for the superiority of index funds came from traditional economics, which treated each investor as a fully rational party. When behavioral economics showed that rationality assumption to be a fiction, with investors subject to a variety of decision-making biases, the claim for active management should have been vindicated. In a marketplace of blind participants, one-eyed professionals figured to be king.

The early research supported that notion. To the astonishment of efficient-market theorists--Eugene Fama was so surprised that he had a graduate student double-check the numbers because he doubted their accuracy--Werner De Bondt and Richard Thaler discovered in 1985 that a very simple plan of buying the stocks with the worst 36-month returns and then holding them for the next 36 months had generated outsized gains over the previous six decades. Such results could not be explained by the efficient-market hypothesis. But they could come from irrational investor overreaction, as predicted by the behavioral economists.

The opportunity for professional managers, it seemed, was immense. If the mindless tactic of buying a basket of losers could comfortably beat the S&P 500, then surely a mindful tactic, informed by a brilliant, trained expert, could absolutely thrash the overall market. Reliably. Consistently. Again and again.

We all know how that has played out. As behavioral economics has grown in popularity, becoming a mainstream academic pursuit and earning Daniel Kahneman a Nobel Prize (an award he would have shared with co-author Amos Tversky, had Tversky been alive), the performance of active portfolio managers has declined. Meanwhile, once-tiny Vanguard has become by far the largest fund company on the globe, mostly courtesy of its index funds. The behavioral-economics boost was no boost at all.

...

All that said, I think that behavioral research does suggest a couple of fruitful investment paths.

One is to use mechanical approaches. According to Kahneman, using a simple algorithm often yields better results than relying on the individual judgment of subject-matter experts. He cites as an example the Apgar test for judging a newborn baby’s health--a simple checklist, capable of being used by various medical staff, that replaced a doctor’s personal evaluation. The adoption of the test proved “an important contribution to reducing infant mortality” because the gain in consistency from using an universal system outweighed the loss of losing personal insights.

The obvious candidates are strategic-beta funds, which mechanize active management’s strategies. Value, momentum, low volatility ... if an attribute appears to offer investment merit and is used as a screen or input by active managers, then it can be converted into a rule (or set of rules) that governs a strategic-beta fund. As with the Apgar test, much complexity is shed when moving from the experts to a rules system. But perhaps the benefit of consistency is worth the trade-off--particularly as strategic-beta funds usually have lower expense ratios.

The other opportunity lies in opting out of the game. Let others pummel each other over the gains to be made from short- to intermediate-term decisions. Whether won by the savviest of the active managers or via smart beta, those prizes will be difficult to obtain, with so many people chasing the same trades. Instead, stand and wait. Buy securities that for some reason--liquidity is one possibility, but there are others--are unattractive to those with shorter horizons but that may deliver above-market returns over the long haul.

This, of course, is the approach followed by the world’s most successful investment fund: Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A). Its disciple, Sequoia Fund (SEQUX), has also fared well, beating just about every single one of its mutual fund peers over the past several decades. Both securities thrive by buying when others are disinterested. Behavioral researchers point out that most people who are making decisions don’t think much about what others are doing, with the result that they unwittingly land in a crowd when they arrive at the same conclusions as the rest of the mob. Berkshire and Sequoia don’t have that problem. They recognize what others have done, and they step the other way.

Wednesday, August 05, 2015

index card investing

Wall Street and its representatives often make investing more complicated than necessary to give investors the idea that they are helpless on their own. University of Chicago professor Harold Pollack has gained acclaim recently for insisting that all the important financial advice you need can fit on one side of a 4x6 index card. When I first heard this, I thought, "How small did he print?" A picture of the index card reveals that Pollack provided nine pieces of advice, written in rather large print. Let's take a look at the professor's recommendations to see if they contain all the financial advice you need.

Here's what I agree with (in principle):

4. Save 20% of your money.  [Not necessarily 20%, but at least something]
5. Pay your credit-card balance in full every month.

***

Here's my number 1 rule (and no. 2)

1. Spend less than you make
2. Invest what you don't spend