Category: Investing Insight

Investing insight to make you a better investor.

8 hard-to-swallow truths about investing

Josh Brown has an interesting observation up on his tumbler page about what investors understand intellectually, but don’t accept in reality.

  1. Anyone can outperform at any time, no one can outperform all the time.
  2. Persistence of performance is nearly non-existent.
  3. Taxes and commissions matter.
  4. Smart doesn’t equal good.
  5. Incentives matter.
  6. The crowd is always at its most wrong at the worst possible time.
  7. Fear is significantly more powerful than greed.
  8. There is no pleasure without the potential for pain.

Source: Seven Truths Investors Simply Cannot Accept

Alpha Warriors vs. Beta Pickers

How do successful investors find alpha? Is it possible to consistently beat the market? Does stock picking work?

Here are some excerpts and links to original articles that should get you thinking.

Leon Cooperman

CNBC’s intro to the legendary hedge fund manager, Leon Cooperman:

The hedge fund manager’s stock-junkie lifestyle starts at 5:15 a.m. on weekdays, when he wakes up in the Short Hills, New Jersey, house he’s lived in for 36 years. He then drives to the Manhattan offices of his $10.7 billion Omega Advisors, getting in by 6:30 a.m. (he took the ferry for 30 years before the firm recently moved from Wall Street to midtown). Cooperman then digs in to investing for 12 hours—including a working lunch in the office—bouncing between grilling corporate executives in person or on the phone, consulting with his 18-person research team and reading company reports. By 6:30 p.m., it’s off to a business dinner with more CEOs or fellow investors like Mario Gabelli of Gamco Investors and Bill Priest of Epoch Investment Partners. Then it’s a quick post-dinner shower and more time in front of a Bloomberg terminal checking international markets before bed at 11 p.m.

Source: Alpha addict: The amazing career of Leon Cooperman

Cooperman’s hedge fund, Omega Advisors, has posted average annual returns of 14.6% net of fees versus the S&P 500’s 9.3% between January 1992 through June 2014. Almost no one else has been that good for that long.

  1. Omega’s secret seems to be betting big on recoveries after sell-offs. Cooperman clearly has a bullish bias and during the opening stages of market recoveries he tends to crush the indices and his fellow hedge fund peers who are typically more encumbered by short bets and hedges that drag.
  2. This outperformance has come with a cost – Omega has not been immune to market downturns.
  3. There are only two up-years for the S&P 500 during this 20-year span in which the market had beaten Omega to the upside.

Source: Omega Advisors vs the S&P 500

Out of 2,862 mutual funds, only 2 beat the market

The S.&P. Dow Jones team looked at 2,862 mutual funds that had been operating for at least 12 months as of March 2010. Those funds were all broad, actively managed domestic stock funds. Key finding:

Very few funds achieved consistent and persistent out-performance. Sustained out-performance declined rapidly over time.

Source: Who Routinely Trounces the Stock Market? Try 2 Out of 2,862 Funds

The dark side of passive investing

Active management is a zero-sum game before costs and a negative sum game after costs, the long-term expected return of low-cost passive investing is higher than that of the average, more expensive active manager. In addition, passive investing offers a high transparency, high liquidity and low risk of regret.

However, passive investors are ignoring compelling academic evidence that the market portfolio includes large groups of stocks with very poor expected performance characteristics. If these considerations are also taken into account, passive investing loses a lot of its initial appeal. As an alternative, we propose a factor investing approach, which avoids going against proven factors such as value, momentum and low-volatility, and actively seeks to benefit from these factors instead.

Source: The dark side of passive investing

Conclusion

You have the Alpha-Warriors on one side and the Beta-Pickers on the other. Right in the middle are the factor investing (a.k.a. smart beta) guys. But the market, being a complex adaptive system, is not going to allow either extremes to win this argument. Finding Alpha is hard. Picking up Beta is easy. May I humbly suggest factor investing through our Themes? Sounds like a good compromise, no?

Individual Investors and the Market Timing Myth

Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior

There’s an annual report, called the Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior, produced by the DALBAR organization, that tracks the behavior of individual investors. Here’s their key finding:

Over the past 20 years, “equity fund” investors achieved an average 5.02% annualized return, which is 4.2% less than the 9.22% that he/she could have achieved by simply investing funds in an S&P500 index-tracking fund.

Although the report covers only retail investors in the US, its findings hold a mirror to investor behavior in general.

Investor education doesn’t help

Louis S. Harvey, President of DALBAR, argues that: “It is now past the time for the investment community and its regulators to understand that the principle of educating uninterested investors about the complexities of investing is unproductive.”

No matter whether the market is booming or busting, “Investor results are more dependent on investor behavior than on fund performance.” Investors who buy and hang on are consistently more successful than those who move in and out of the markets.

The report concludes:

“Attempts to correct irrational investor behavior through education have proved to be futile. The belief that investors will make prudent decisions after education and disclosure has been totally discredited. Instead of teaching, financial professionals should look to implement practices that influence the investor’s focus and expectations in ways that lead to more prudent investment decisions.”

Are our policy makers, SEBI included, taking notes?

Source: financial-math.org

93 Technical Indicators that don’t Predict Market Returns

There’s a research paper out that looks at 93 common technical indicators and concludes that they have no predictive power whatsoever:

We review the predictability of a wide range of 93 technical market indicators in predicting the S&P 500 returns. This adds to the literature with evidence from widely used but less examined market indicators, to more conclusively answer the question of whether technical analysis is useful or not. Overall, we do not find the market indicators generate profits that beat the buy and hold strategy. This result does not change if we consider the possibility of regime-switching predictability on business cycles or sentiment cycles. Moreover, our results remain robust if we use a GARCH (1,1) or robust regression method.

Source: Technical Market Indicators: An Overview

Related: Technical Analysis

Refracting Fund Portfolios: PPFAS

  1. Where does alpha come from?
  2. How much should you pay for alpha?
  3. If a fund manager claims that his portfolio is a “long-term” bet, then does it make sense to just buy all the stocks in his portfolio rather than pay him an asset management fee for the privilege?
  4. How much do “other” investments add to returns?
  5. Will an equally weighted portfolio out-perform a hand-crafted weighting?

To answer these questions, we have started an experiment. We have created an equally weighted portfolio of NSE listed stocks in the PPFAS Long Term Value Fund (Factsheet.) The Theme will be re-balanced once a month, as soon as the PPFAS portfolio disclosure becomes public. As of the latest information available, 72% of the fund’s portfolio was invested in Indian equities & 21% is invested in foreign equities with the balance amount in Cash Equivalents.

Over a period of time, we hope to answer the questions we have raised above.

You can follow the Theme here: Refract: PPFAS Long Term Value Fund

Refract: (of water, air, or glass) make (a ray of light) change direction when it enters at an angle. From Latin refract- ‘broken up’, from the verb refringere, from re- ‘back’ + frangere ‘to break’.