The problem with buy and hold and pretty much every current strategy is that its distorted by the huge 40 year bull market we've seen in the USA. Every American asset has gone up big time - of course "time in the market" is a good thing.
If you look at Japanese or European stock markets they tell a very different story. Similarly the next 40 years in the USA could be a miserable time for investors. I can't believe how much people take for granted that stock markets "usually go up 7% a year" or whatever.
No one really knows but it wont be as good as the last few decades.
> No one really knows but it wont be as good as the last few decades.
Such confidence! The first part is of course true, but you’ll make money teaching the market that you are smarter if the latter is true.
Perfectly possible that AI kicks the economy into overdrive in the next few years and growth increases. I wouldn’t bet my house on it, but also wouldn’t bet my house against it either.
Absolutely no chance that AI is able to do that. Investing decisions are too subjective for the current state of AI. A good value investor knows this… and also knows that you don’t need a bull market to make decent returns.
Of course predicting the future is impossible. But there’s a lot more than 40 years of data to support the buy-and-hold idea. The updated Trinity Study spans from 1925 to 2009, so includes the worst economic calamity in US history. It concludes an inflation-adjusted 4% withdrawal rate is safe for 30 years in 95% of historical 30 year periods. An inflation-adjusted 3% withdrawal rate succeeded in every 30-year period.
Why? Retirement is a very recent phenomena. The idea of someone earning enough during their working life to then fund several decades of non-working life is a very modern thing, maybe only the last sixty years or so. Only a very rarified few were ever wealthy enough to actively stop working prior to becoming physically unable to work. And then, for most all of human history, those too old to work lived out their remaining few years being taken care of by their children. I'm would not casually assume any "right" to the modern concept of retirement.
With the excessive debt (which is not slowing down) the government is planting the seeds for high inflation in the long term. This historically has been very bad for equities (in real terms).
I believe human ingenuity and power over the elements goes up 7% a year, of which, the stock market is a proxy for. We are a networked organism and good at leveraging innovation at a global scale through supply chains. I see no reason to be pessimistic, we have AI, we have better space flight, we constantly improving energy sources.
Then why didn't the markets go up in Japan and Europe (per the GP)? Also, why do the US (and maybe other) securities markets increase when the underlying economy is performing poorly?
One thing to consider though is that our nation has taken a lot of debt -in many philosophical forms- to fuel that growth.
Government deficit spending of course helping the economy. But we eventually have to pay taxes to cover that.
Citizens debt fueled spending on homes and goods. Corporate debt similarly. Student loans of course. Individuals and companies can only tolerate so much debt.
Our oil dependence never accounted for the cost of global warming and pollution, but we’re about to pay for that soon. This applies to many materials we consume, oil being the most prominent.
Corporations have systematically slowed pay growth while increasing prices, eventually consumers will be unable to afford enough goods to keep the machine spinning at full (growing 7%) capacity.
Our shrinking population from historic highs means each working person will need to contribute a bigger share to reach that 7%, while having more people to support.
I agree that the American stock market has been an outlier, and most Americans don't realize the extent to which that is true; it's good that you do. But compared to buying and holding a widely diversified and low cost portfolio, what was the better strategy for investors in other markets? What would be the better strategy for Americans over the next 40 years (not knowing if it will be a miserable time or not)?
I think this is a case of "time in the market" being the least worst option. The market may reward it, or it may not, but hard times are hard times and I don't see any obvious way to avoid them without exposing yourself to a lot more risk in other ways.
People keep talking down the US but the only advanced economy reliably innovating at scale. Especially in the post-COVID era, as China faces growth collapse.
You don't have to look far to see that all the major tech developments of our species are coming out of the US: Generative AI, Reusable Rockets, self-driving cars, mRNA, Genetic Engineering, NIF Fusion, VR, etc. The US could strike it out on any single item and spark another industrial revolution.
Plus we're still king of the hill in so many other categories (World's largest producer of energy, world's largest agriculture producer, world's largest military, etc.) If you're an investor, the idea that you'd bet against the US economy is a hilariously bad take.
This is what I think too. Now obviously we're possibly on the verge of another massive change in tech with AI but there's still nothing that guarantees that the market has to go up.
The market is composed of companies, each of these companies are composed of people trying to better their own lives by working hard. When you buy an index fund you are essentially betting on all these people collectively working hard to improve their lives and if incentives are correctly aligned this should also mean the value of these businesses growing.
Correct. Imagine if you bought and hold in Japan in the 1980's. Buy 2023, maybe you would have broken even [1]
There are 2 problems:
1. Market timing works:
a. With inside information e.g. US congress
b. Take an outsised risk e.g. Nasem Taleb keep buying/selling deep out of the money options. Lose money every day to make an outsised gain
2. You are Warren Buffet. Which is basically buy stocks like you are buying a company. Have the option of buying preferential shares. And hey 1b monkeys on typewriters...
Still totally agree with the OP. The last 40 years have been ridiculous from a macro perspective:
1. Interest rates, the most important price in the economy, the price of money, has fallen from 18% in the Paul Volker days till after covid close to 0.
2. Money has been printed like never before after the 08 collapse and covid.
It is very difficult to look at 2023, with the US fed cash rate at approx 5%, global interest rates going up, price inflation at 7%+, US national debt at $33T and growing at $1T per month exponentially, and the US paying more on Interest expense (not principal, just Interest) than they spend on the military.
I like Nassem Taleb. Invest still in index funds but invest in global infrastructure that is recession proof e..g [3]. Be anti-fragile
Part of the reason for the bull run is that people have 401ks. They have IRAs. They buy index funds. In either case the amount of americans who automatically devote a portion of their pay to buying equites has probably never been higher.
Isn't that only a problem if you are only invested in the US? There exists ETFs that are invested in multiple developed countries, such as index funds that track the MSCI World.
and the 7% is skewed towards a small % of companies that have averaged up the S&P 500, usually big tech companies. If you look at the distribution and median return its actually far less.
There are probably multiple layers of feedback loops going on, who knows how things will pan out. There's a sufficiently large enough pool of investors out there that will buy broad ETFs like SCHB, SPY, VT, VTI, etc., on any dip or just continue to DCA a little of every paycheck into those just due to its history. The US is geographically isolated from potential threats for the most part unlike Europe and Japan, is relatively self-sufficient, super diversified and lots of international exposure, and no country has as much clout on the international stage as the US for the time being so I think it makes sense the US continues to do much better. Sometimes you have trends like emerging markets, cryptos, etc., but broad US stock market seems like the default choice for high returns so long as there is capital to be allocated.
Interest rates are the thing I think could change things, but who knows. If you can get a guaranteed 5% return that's pretty nice, but it's possible we just slide into being a more corrupt/untrustworthy country for investments or baby boomers suddenly taking a disproportionate amount of money out of the market as they retire, etc.,.
> No one really knows but it wont be as good as the last few decades.
A little bit contradictory.
If you don’t think the stock market is going to appreciate then it’s not for you. Don’t invest in it at all. You can stick with savings accounts, gold, and crypto scams.
For unsophisticated investors, timing the market tends to keep money on the sidelines during growth periods, eroding long-term returns. This is part of why it's considered an investing sin - "time in the market beats timing the market." Sophisticated systematic investors can probably get good results with certain momentum-based market timing strategies, but most of us aren't sophisticated systematic investors.
To go into further detail about systemic investing:
There have been experiments like the turtle traders ^ 1 who applied "trend following", used today by many CTAs on exotic markets. For this, an investor taught some people his strategy/rules, gave them his money and they've shined for 40 years. The fundamental strategy still works today (updated). Fundamentally, it's a method to ride momentum in different ways (e.g. crossectional.) Hedge fund managers like Rzepczynski, Cem Karsan, Alan Beer... Richard Brennan is the most insightful of them who shares his methods freely. N.b. trend following doesn't work well in stock markets, but flourishes in Mexican rate swaps, orange juice futures, London sugar... combined in ensembles.
Traditional value investors, building on the Intelligent Investor, have always done well over samples above a few years. (N.b. Warren Buffet hasn't been a value investor for a long time, because he has too much to manage. He was strongly inspired by Fisher's Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, which gave us the concept of "growth stocks".) (N.b. 2, value investing ETFs are mostly terrible, fundamentally not investing in value stocks due to their structures.)
Carisle's Acquierer's Multiple is the most recent development in systemic value investing (he also runs an ETF or two along these lines). "Magic formula investing" even holds up too!
In the mining space, you also get discretionary (not purely systematic) investors like Rick Rule openly discussing their methodologies, successful for decades and decades.
Here’s an interesting paper ^ 2 (exec summary pages 5-6). Note that 70% of underperformance is due to investors withdrawing funds during times of market crisis. Fund fees also drive the majority of underperformance. N.b. most wealth managers can't legally follow such strategies because of the prudent person rule. They are legally forced to underperform typical indices - and the majority of research has focused on them, distorting the data pool.
> Traditional value investors, building on the Intelligent Investor, have always done well over samples above a few years.
From the last published interview with Benjamin Graham, author of II ("A Conversation with Benjamin Graham", Financial Analysts Journal, September-October 1976)
> > In selecting the common stock portfolio, do you advise careful study of and selectivity among different issues?
> In general, no. I am no longer an advocate of elaborate techniques of security analysis in order to find superior value opportunities. This was a rewarding activity, say, 40 years ago, when our textbook "Graham and Dodd" was first published; but the situation has changed a great deal since then. In the old days any well-trained security analyst could do a good professional job of selecting undervalued issues through detailed studies; but in the light of the enormous amount of research now being carried on, I doubt whether in most cases such extensive efforts will generate sufficiently superior selections to justify their cost. To that very limited extent I'm on the side of the "efficient market" school of thought now generally accepted by the professors.
Fun! I'll save your comment (and upvoted it). Curious to see where this rabbit whole goes. On another point, I'd like to suggest you reference as follows [1]. I found that syntax to be more prevalent on HN than ^ [2]. It's easier to parse, since you know it's separate from the sentence. Whereas if I write that I have a reference like ^ 3 then it is harder to see that ^ 3 is apart from the sentence or part of it.
[1] This part you did do that way, haha.
[2] I haven't done a formal count, but I'm sure some regex search engine will give you many hits if you search for \[[0-9]\].
The fact that you're being downvoted for factual contributions kind of explains why it's possible to beat the markets. Most people refuse to believe it.
No public strategies are going to beat the market by a huge amount, and having the discipline to execute them manually isn't easy, but it has been clearly shown to be possible.
This has been my experience too, I missed out more by being sidlined during good times than I saved. Personally as an engineering mindset person I am good at identifying likely failure modes of companies (i.e. reality) but rarely anticipate how much things will go up during good times which is more of a social phenomenon (hype).
Understanding potential failure modes for companies is a much more important part of credit investing (this is what I do for a living these days, though I've done equity investing as well).
Unfortunately a very large part of the credit universe is very difficult to access if you're a non-professional investor though.
It seems like identifying failure modes could work if you could model the likelihood of the company going bankrupt in a certain amount of time because even if the enterprise is working on failure mode, public markets have been popularity contests for a really long time.
Ever since I read The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, I can't take anything related to the stock market seriously (among other things as well, but this post is related to the stock market, so that's why I'm focusing on it.)
There's very little skill involved, which isn't to say there is no skill involved whatsoever - but at the end of the day it really is just luck
The following excerpts are from Thinking, Fast and Slow:
"The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the industry. Facts that challenge such basic assumptions—and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem—are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them. This is particularly true of statistical studies of performance, which provide base-rate information that people generally ignore when it clashes with their personal impressions from experience."
"Finally, the illusions of validity and skill are supported by a powerful professional culture. We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers. Given the professional culture of the financial community, it is not surprising that large numbers of individuals in that world believe themselves to be among the chosen few who can do what they believe others cannot."
FWIW ever since Kahneman, Ariely and similar company have had some of their theories get discredited (Ariely's taint is worse because it's to do with fabricating research!) I have gone back to simply resorting to common sense and quotidian skepticism.
This is an interview with two academic researchers into active fund managers who can indeed beat the market consistently sometimes. One factor why they exist is that they have access to better information than the average individual investor. However, (1) excess returns tend to mostly get absorbed by higher fees and (2) it's very difficult to scale it up, funds who beat the market tend to lose this edge when more funds go into them. Thus, market-beating funds, if they want to maintain their edge, have to severely limit who can invest in the fund and how much they can put into it.
The episode also goes into the effect of security selection (which stocks are picked) vs market timing, which is relevant to TFA.
If there are really just a few, it could be explained by chance. Warren Buffet is often cited in that group and yet, a blindfolded monkey would have done better than him in the past 20 years[0].
You should also read Adaptive Markets by Andrew Lo. It talks about how behavior psychology affects the markets, as Homo Economicus does not really exist, people are not rational actors individually or even at scale in other domains (see, for example, loss aversion) so there is no reason to think we are rational when dealing with the markets either.
In the Black Swan he talks about his endeavor with the stock market and how lucky he got by chance, and not by using some pseudo scientific formulas and whatnot to "predict" how his stocks would do. He also gave some pretty good advice when it comes to the stock market
The whole book is just awesome, I'd recommend giving it a read
One of my family members is absolutely convinced that they can time the market and it kinda drives me up the wall every time it comes up. They will use all these “techniques” to draw arbitrary lines on the chart to establish a trend in the market while watching the news like a hawk everyday.
Meanwhile I just get on with my day with index funds and get better returns.
> Buffett's ultimately successful contention was that, including fees, costs and expenses, an S&P 500 index fund would outperform a hand-picked portfolio of hedge funds over 10 years. The bet pit two basic investing philosophies against each other: passive and active investing.
Isn’t a large part of the underperformance of the hedge funds due to their fee structure? Investors lose 20%+ of the profits just in fees. While I don’t think stock picking is a great idea for the layman, that fee structure isn’t generalizable to the average Joe picking stocks.
I believe there’s some evidence that low-volatility trading has been shown to beat the market over long periods of time. Although, “picking stocks for volatility” may be different than “timing stock picks”
Yeah, I don't doubt that there are real people timing the market successfully. But as you said, those methods are under NDAs, not given by random gurus on YouTubes!
Timing absolutely doesn't work in my experience. This effectively makes many forms of derivative instrument worthless to me. There are only a few targeted situations where I believe something might happen within a certain window, but I absolutely wouldn't bet more than 1-2% of my portfolio on anything with time decay attached to it.
What works better for me is joining in on earnings calls and reviewing presentation materials. Getting a sense for product roadmap, markets, competition, etc. This is the space where you can actually develop meaningful hypotheses regarding what might happen. Those who are performing time series astrology likely do not have the patience to go about things this way.
If you don't have time to spend about a day per quarter reviewing your portfolio, then you probably shouldn't be playing in traffic with individual stock picks, much less options contracts. If you think this is an unreasonable amount of time to spend playing investor, then perhaps you should just buy a little bit of something like $QQQ every day and focus on those other parts of life that are clearly more important to you.
Or, just contribute max to your 401k and close that distracting Robinhood account. Most people would do better over the long haul if they followed that bit of advice. Monkey brain is much more dangerous than losing a few % APY to fund management fees and sub-par allocations.
I keep telling my friends who get really into stock investment, read some stuff, invent strategies - and end up much worse (sometimes losing money) than me just dumping everything into a few almost random indices:
1. Greed (not as a pejorative or a judgmental term, just this itchy feeling that you want more than you have even if you gain and are not satisfied) is the fastest way to lose money, whether through a poor investment or being scammed.
2. When you decide to play a game of stock investment, who are you playing it against? Being better than average (just market returns) means being better than the average (not median!) player, who in this case is some institutional investor. Do they really think that with a few online courses they can be consistently better than people who do this stuff for a living?
QQQ went like 17 years from its 2001 high till it made it back to the same price. S&P is probably less stressful for the type of investor you are talking about.
> This effectively makes many forms of derivative instrument worthless to me.
Derivatives have another, much more valuable use: They enable you to hedge your investment, essentially insurance.
For example, if you invest heavily in agriculture in Iowa, you might buy derivatives tied to the weather and to the price of whatever you grow - derivatives that pay if those things go bad. You lose a little if things go well, but that's just the cost of insurance. Similarly, if you invest heavily in electric vehicles, you might by a derivative tied to the price of key inputs, such as metals for batteries.
To time the market, you need visibility into it down fine intervals and tools not available to anyone without a 3 digit investment. Common tools obfuscate data. A typical movement of the market that is obvious on a detailed chart, is explained haphazardly by likely automated financial press. The jobs data was strong on Friday, leading to likelihood of higher interest rates for longer, yet the market jumped up that day? Was that a Dead cat bounce? Short-sellers exiting their positions before a long weekend? A move to drum up retail investor interest in a last ditch effort before the S&P crosses the 4200 point of no return? The beginning of the next bull market?
The retail investor software is designed to take advantage of retail investors left and right. Placing trades is error prone. The spreads can be ridiculous (0.5% at 9:30am). the market zigzags consistently so no stop loss is left un-triggered before a bounce. These conditions are currently leading to a world of take-profit trading. Timing works if you pay attention to it all the time, but most don’t have the time for that. Your retailer software won’t warn you when you are losing profits gained in the past year. That’s why long term investors become complacent after a long stretch of growth and stop paying attention. With bots trading increasingly more and interest rates remaining higher, the market will not look the same as it did since 2010 AT ALL and the data from before then is only a usable in detail to those who can pay. Once retail investors have seen the lines go down. the bounce back won’t be as linear as 2020 or this spring. Treasuries require a lot less sweat.
Most derivatives traders I know in the industry do some version of buy-and-hold for their personal portfolios, but one of the best I know does something completely different. He sticks to a philosophy of scanning multiple "small" cap companies(<50-100mm mktcap) until he finds one he generally likes, then figures out absolutely everything he can about them. Every piece of information available, down to calling whoever he can in management. Then once he decides he likes it, he commits 20-30% of his portfolio into them, often becoming a small, but notable investor in the company itself.
He's made massive amounts of money from this. He admits that it's basically a second job in terms of time and effort spent, but believes that it's replicable because no institutional investor is actually looking at these stocks, leading to hypothetical mispricings.
While I agree with the general principle of the post, I am skeptical of the fact that schwab published it. If it was done third party research, I would trust it more.
(Internet has made me skeptical)
However, the only incentive I can think of schwab is to encourage people to invest ASAP they have cash so schwab can get that money in their system so they can charge fees/still services.
Readit News
If you look at Japanese or European stock markets they tell a very different story. Similarly the next 40 years in the USA could be a miserable time for investors. I can't believe how much people take for granted that stock markets "usually go up 7% a year" or whatever.
No one really knows but it wont be as good as the last few decades.
Such confidence! The first part is of course true, but you’ll make money teaching the market that you are smarter if the latter is true.
Perfectly possible that AI kicks the economy into overdrive in the next few years and growth increases. I wouldn’t bet my house on it, but also wouldn’t bet my house against it either.
2 - Their retirement should be financed by 401ks and the like.
3 - Stock Markets can go down as well as up.
You can't have all three, so the government will always ensure that the stock market goes up long term.
Why? Retirement is a very recent phenomena. The idea of someone earning enough during their working life to then fund several decades of non-working life is a very modern thing, maybe only the last sixty years or so. Only a very rarified few were ever wealthy enough to actively stop working prior to becoming physically unable to work. And then, for most all of human history, those too old to work lived out their remaining few years being taken care of by their children. I'm would not casually assume any "right" to the modern concept of retirement.
Deleted Comment
Government deficit spending of course helping the economy. But we eventually have to pay taxes to cover that.
Citizens debt fueled spending on homes and goods. Corporate debt similarly. Student loans of course. Individuals and companies can only tolerate so much debt.
Our oil dependence never accounted for the cost of global warming and pollution, but we’re about to pay for that soon. This applies to many materials we consume, oil being the most prominent.
Corporations have systematically slowed pay growth while increasing prices, eventually consumers will be unable to afford enough goods to keep the machine spinning at full (growing 7%) capacity.
Our shrinking population from historic highs means each working person will need to contribute a bigger share to reach that 7%, while having more people to support.
I think this is a case of "time in the market" being the least worst option. The market may reward it, or it may not, but hard times are hard times and I don't see any obvious way to avoid them without exposing yourself to a lot more risk in other ways.
You don't have to look far to see that all the major tech developments of our species are coming out of the US: Generative AI, Reusable Rockets, self-driving cars, mRNA, Genetic Engineering, NIF Fusion, VR, etc. The US could strike it out on any single item and spark another industrial revolution.
Plus we're still king of the hill in so many other categories (World's largest producer of energy, world's largest agriculture producer, world's largest military, etc.) If you're an investor, the idea that you'd bet against the US economy is a hilariously bad take.
could easily turn out to be another nft style "boom"
There are 2 problems: 1. Market timing works: a. With inside information e.g. US congress b. Take an outsised risk e.g. Nasem Taleb keep buying/selling deep out of the money options. Lose money every day to make an outsised gain 2. You are Warren Buffet. Which is basically buy stocks like you are buying a company. Have the option of buying preferential shares. And hey 1b monkeys on typewriters...
Still totally agree with the OP. The last 40 years have been ridiculous from a macro perspective: 1. Interest rates, the most important price in the economy, the price of money, has fallen from 18% in the Paul Volker days till after covid close to 0. 2. Money has been printed like never before after the 08 collapse and covid.
It is very difficult to look at 2023, with the US fed cash rate at approx 5%, global interest rates going up, price inflation at 7%+, US national debt at $33T and growing at $1T per month exponentially, and the US paying more on Interest expense (not principal, just Interest) than they spend on the military.
I like Nassem Taleb. Invest still in index funds but invest in global infrastructure that is recession proof e..g [3]. Be anti-fragile
[1] https://sdw.ecb.europa.eu/quickview.do?SERIES_KEY=143.FM.M.J... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/why-doe... [3] https://www.vanguard.com.au/personal/invest-with-us/fund?por...
Decades of something being true will do that
Interest rates are the thing I think could change things, but who knows. If you can get a guaranteed 5% return that's pretty nice, but it's possible we just slide into being a more corrupt/untrustworthy country for investments or baby boomers suddenly taking a disproportionate amount of money out of the market as they retire, etc.,.
Dead Comment
A little bit contradictory.
If you don’t think the stock market is going to appreciate then it’s not for you. Don’t invest in it at all. You can stick with savings accounts, gold, and crypto scams.
For unsophisticated investors, timing the market tends to keep money on the sidelines during growth periods, eroding long-term returns. This is part of why it's considered an investing sin - "time in the market beats timing the market." Sophisticated systematic investors can probably get good results with certain momentum-based market timing strategies, but most of us aren't sophisticated systematic investors.
There have been experiments like the turtle traders ^ 1 who applied "trend following", used today by many CTAs on exotic markets. For this, an investor taught some people his strategy/rules, gave them his money and they've shined for 40 years. The fundamental strategy still works today (updated). Fundamentally, it's a method to ride momentum in different ways (e.g. crossectional.) Hedge fund managers like Rzepczynski, Cem Karsan, Alan Beer... Richard Brennan is the most insightful of them who shares his methods freely. N.b. trend following doesn't work well in stock markets, but flourishes in Mexican rate swaps, orange juice futures, London sugar... combined in ensembles.
Traditional value investors, building on the Intelligent Investor, have always done well over samples above a few years. (N.b. Warren Buffet hasn't been a value investor for a long time, because he has too much to manage. He was strongly inspired by Fisher's Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, which gave us the concept of "growth stocks".) (N.b. 2, value investing ETFs are mostly terrible, fundamentally not investing in value stocks due to their structures.)
Carisle's Acquierer's Multiple is the most recent development in systemic value investing (he also runs an ETF or two along these lines). "Magic formula investing" even holds up too!
In the mining space, you also get discretionary (not purely systematic) investors like Rick Rule openly discussing their methodologies, successful for decades and decades.
Here’s an interesting paper ^ 2 (exec summary pages 5-6). Note that 70% of underperformance is due to investors withdrawing funds during times of market crisis. Fund fees also drive the majority of underperformance. N.b. most wealth managers can't legally follow such strategies because of the prudent person rule. They are legally forced to underperform typical indices - and the majority of research has focused on them, distorting the data pool.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/trading/08/turtle-trad...
[2] https://wealthwatchadvisors.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Q...
From the last published interview with Benjamin Graham, author of II ("A Conversation with Benjamin Graham", Financial Analysts Journal, September-October 1976)
> > In selecting the common stock portfolio, do you advise careful study of and selectivity among different issues?
> In general, no. I am no longer an advocate of elaborate techniques of security analysis in order to find superior value opportunities. This was a rewarding activity, say, 40 years ago, when our textbook "Graham and Dodd" was first published; but the situation has changed a great deal since then. In the old days any well-trained security analyst could do a good professional job of selecting undervalued issues through detailed studies; but in the light of the enormous amount of research now being carried on, I doubt whether in most cases such extensive efforts will generate sufficiently superior selections to justify their cost. To that very limited extent I'm on the side of the "efficient market" school of thought now generally accepted by the professors.
* http://www.grahamanddoddsville.net/wordpress/Files/Gurus/Ben...
[1] This part you did do that way, haha.
[2] I haven't done a formal count, but I'm sure some regex search engine will give you many hits if you search for \[[0-9]\].
[3] That last sentence still confuses me.
No public strategies are going to beat the market by a huge amount, and having the discipline to execute them manually isn't easy, but it has been clearly shown to be possible.
Unfortunately a very large part of the credit universe is very difficult to access if you're a non-professional investor though.
There's very little skill involved, which isn't to say there is no skill involved whatsoever - but at the end of the day it really is just luck
The following excerpts are from Thinking, Fast and Slow:
"The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the industry. Facts that challenge such basic assumptions—and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem—are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them. This is particularly true of statistical studies of performance, which provide base-rate information that people generally ignore when it clashes with their personal impressions from experience."
"Finally, the illusions of validity and skill are supported by a powerful professional culture. We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers. Given the professional culture of the financial community, it is not surprising that large numbers of individuals in that world believe themselves to be among the chosen few who can do what they believe others cannot."
Could you elaborate?
https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/220
This is an interview with two academic researchers into active fund managers who can indeed beat the market consistently sometimes. One factor why they exist is that they have access to better information than the average individual investor. However, (1) excess returns tend to mostly get absorbed by higher fees and (2) it's very difficult to scale it up, funds who beat the market tend to lose this edge when more funds go into them. Thus, market-beating funds, if they want to maintain their edge, have to severely limit who can invest in the fund and how much they can put into it.
The episode also goes into the effect of security selection (which stocks are picked) vs market timing, which is relevant to TFA.
[0] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/warren-buffett-has-underperfo...
In the Black Swan he talks about his endeavor with the stock market and how lucky he got by chance, and not by using some pseudo scientific formulas and whatnot to "predict" how his stocks would do. He also gave some pretty good advice when it comes to the stock market
The whole book is just awesome, I'd recommend giving it a read
Meanwhile I just get on with my day with index funds and get better returns.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/030916/buffe...
I believe there’s some evidence that low-volatility trading has been shown to beat the market over long periods of time. Although, “picking stocks for volatility” may be different than “timing stock picks”
2. They would be much richer if they could.
What works better for me is joining in on earnings calls and reviewing presentation materials. Getting a sense for product roadmap, markets, competition, etc. This is the space where you can actually develop meaningful hypotheses regarding what might happen. Those who are performing time series astrology likely do not have the patience to go about things this way.
If you don't have time to spend about a day per quarter reviewing your portfolio, then you probably shouldn't be playing in traffic with individual stock picks, much less options contracts. If you think this is an unreasonable amount of time to spend playing investor, then perhaps you should just buy a little bit of something like $QQQ every day and focus on those other parts of life that are clearly more important to you.
Or, just contribute max to your 401k and close that distracting Robinhood account. Most people would do better over the long haul if they followed that bit of advice. Monkey brain is much more dangerous than losing a few % APY to fund management fees and sub-par allocations.
Derivatives have another, much more valuable use: They enable you to hedge your investment, essentially insurance.
For example, if you invest heavily in agriculture in Iowa, you might buy derivatives tied to the weather and to the price of whatever you grow - derivatives that pay if those things go bad. You lose a little if things go well, but that's just the cost of insurance. Similarly, if you invest heavily in electric vehicles, you might by a derivative tied to the price of key inputs, such as metals for batteries.
....and you don't even need a few percent to throw it in a target date fund that regularly rebalances for you
The retail investor software is designed to take advantage of retail investors left and right. Placing trades is error prone. The spreads can be ridiculous (0.5% at 9:30am). the market zigzags consistently so no stop loss is left un-triggered before a bounce. These conditions are currently leading to a world of take-profit trading. Timing works if you pay attention to it all the time, but most don’t have the time for that. Your retailer software won’t warn you when you are losing profits gained in the past year. That’s why long term investors become complacent after a long stretch of growth and stop paying attention. With bots trading increasingly more and interest rates remaining higher, the market will not look the same as it did since 2010 AT ALL and the data from before then is only a usable in detail to those who can pay. Once retail investors have seen the lines go down. the bounce back won’t be as linear as 2020 or this spring. Treasuries require a lot less sweat.
He's made massive amounts of money from this. He admits that it's basically a second job in terms of time and effort spent, but believes that it's replicable because no institutional investor is actually looking at these stocks, leading to hypothetical mispricings.
(Internet has made me skeptical)
However, the only incentive I can think of schwab is to encourage people to invest ASAP they have cash so schwab can get that money in their system so they can charge fees/still services.
But that’s just normal business
The article is educational and generally stands up to the research on the topic. It is designed to build trust with clients so they invest in Schwab.
Compared to IBKR which gives "benchmark - 0.5%" on your NAV in USD, what does Schwab give for your USD sitting idle?