Category: Investing Insight

Investing insight to make you a better investor.

Institutional Investing Trends

A quick update to our II Trend report from last month.

Foreign Institutional Investors keep the faith

FII invested $1742.07 million in debt vs $1221.89 million in equities so far in Septmeber.

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Domestic Institutionals were obsessed with debt

In September, DIIs invested Rs 20,379.6 cr in debt vs. -310.5 cr in equity.

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A trade for everyone

Not sure what I like better – debt or equity. Debt investors will benefit from the falling interest rate environment in AAA paper and shrinking defaults in sub-primes. Equity investors will benefit from improving balance-sheets and an improving demand-side equation. Stay tuned…

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Keynes’ key to successful investing: He abandoned forecasting

Read an interesting article in the FT by Tim Harford about forecasting. Was hit by a couple of “aha moments”.

First:

Keynes’s track record over a quarter century running the discretionary portfolio of King’s College Cambridge was excellent, outperforming market benchmarks by an average of six percentage points a year, an impressive margin.

The secret to Keynes’s profits is that he abandoned macroeconomic forecasting entirely. Instead, he sought out well-managed companies with strong dividend yields, and held on to them for the long term. Keynes, the most influential macroeconomist in history, realized not only that such forecasts were beyond his skill but that they were unnecessary.

And here’s the other gem:

Most forecasters aren’t actually seriously and single-mindedly trying to see into the future. If they were, they’d keep score and try to improve their predictions based on past errors. They don’t.

This is because their predictions are about the future only in the most superficial way. They are really advertisements, conversation pieces, declarations of tribal loyalty…

Read the whole thing: How to see into the future

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Wiggle or Wobble: Scotland?

Scotland has been part of the United Kingdom for over 300 years. On September 18th, they vote to determine whether they want independence from the Queen or not. The referendum was announced back in 2012 but nobody took it seriously because everybody assumed that it will be a NO vote for independence. But a poll released late Saturday showed pro-independence voters in the lead for the first time since the Scottish referendum campaign began. The British Pound collapsed to a 10-month low once reality dawned on the markets.

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Executives from defense, financial-services and energy companies have all voiced concerns for the future shape of their respective industries amid surging support for independence. British defense officials have warned that warship production in Scotland could be affected. Oil and gas companies are worried, for instance, that an independent Scottish government would be more reliant on oil revenue for its budget than the larger U.K. has been. That could provide a temptation to squeeze more tax from companies if production keeps declining and tax revenue shrinks.

Unresolved questions concerning how much the amount of the U.K.’s debt an independent Scotland would assume, and how bond markets would rate that debt have brought huge uncertainty for financial-services companies.

Credit Suisse:

In our opinion Scotland would fall into a deep recession. We believe deposit flight is both highly likely and highly problematic (with banks assets of 12x GDP)…

Citi:

Overall, we do not think that a “Yes” or “No” vote will have a significant impact, barring short-term risks, on prospects for UK equity market returns over the coming quarters.

So far, market jitters have been largely contained to the FX market. But will this wiggle turn into a wobble?

Sources:

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Your Friends may be your Portfolio’s worst Enemy

Consider this:

  • People who live near each other increase their ownership of stocks around the same time.
  • 401(k) investors put more money into stocks when their co-workers have recently earned high returns that way.
  • Mutual-fund managers are more likely to invest in a company when other stock-pickers in the same city are also buying it.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller found that for 62% of individual investors and a shocking 75% of institutional investors, the decision to invest in stocks with hot recent returns had nothing to do with a “systematic search.”

Instead, these investors seemed to chase whatever grabbed their attention the most because other people were talking about it.

And it is not only in investing. “Group attention” – the experience of simultaneous co-attention with one’s group members – increases emotional intensity relative to attending alone. Greater fear, gloom, and glee is a result from group attention to scary, sad, and happy events, respectively.

Individuals come to feel more when they are together.

Sources:

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Howard Marks on Risk

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Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital on risk:

We hear it all the time: “Riskier investments produce higher returns” and “If you want to make more money, take more risk.” Both of these formulations are terrible. In brief, if riskier investments could be counted on to produce higher returns, they wouldn’t be riskier.

You can read the whole thing here:

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