Archive for December 2013
Following the post I wrote about deep risk vs shallow risk, I went to Amazon and flipped through Bill Bernstein’s latest book “Deep Risk” to see if he feels the same way as me.
It turns out there is a lot that we agree on, but not everything.
Here’s where we see eye to eye: 1) our definitions of deep and shallow risks are almost the same: 2) we both see market fluctuation as a shallow risk and 3) we both see inflation as the #1 deep risk.
Our agreement stops there however. Bernstein does not seem to believe behavior risk and agency risk are deep risks, as I do. Instead, he mentions the following three risks as deep risks in addition to inflation risk.
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Deep Risk vs Shallow Risk
Posted on: December 24, 2013
Recently, a prospective client of mine sent me an email asking about my thoughts on Bill Bernstein’s new book “Deep Risk.” I have not read the book yet, but I do have my own ideas about deep risk vs shallow risk.
I define shallow risk as a potential loss that you can recover from and deep risk as a loss that you cannot recover from.
Market volatility, for example, is a shallow risk. It is very visible and it is scary, there is even a TV channel devoted to it. (That TV channel is called CNBC.)
But taking on shallow risk is how you earn your investment keep. Thus, it should not be feared, it should be welcomed.
Now what are the deep risks you should ardently avoid? I can think of three: inflation risk, behavior risk and agency risk.
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2013 has been a stellar year for stocks. As of today, the S&P 500 is up more than 25%. There are about ten trading days left and barring unforeseen circumstance, the index will end the year in the 20+% range.
A few of my clients are concerned; with the market doing so well this year, what does that bode for 2014? Well, I don’t have a crystal ball, so all I can do is to look at historical data to make an imperfect reference.
To answer the question, I asked my intern Nahae Kim to do a study of the relationship of immediately subsequent year returns. Specifically, can one year return predict the next year?
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A few days ago, my wife came home telling me the story of a sweet old lady she had met at her army clinic.
She is a 75 year old lady from Thailand, married to an American veteran for 40 years. Her husband just passed away a few months ago at the age of 92.
She couldn’t stop telling my wife how much she missed her husband, that he had married her despite the fact that she was a divorced woman with kids and that she could barely speak English. She went on and on about how he had treated her like a queen, buying her all the pretty things women like and so on and so forth.
Now everytime she passes by her husband’s picture, she still cries; and yet the memory of her husband is all she’s got left, now that she has no income and the home she has lived in for 40 years is being foreclosed.
What happened?
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You Sold My Apple? What a Shame!
Posted on: December 4, 2013
That was a message I got from a new client of mine. I must admit, it really bites. Yes, I sold his Apple stock. And yes, since then the price has gone up 15%. So of course, I can understand he’s upset and beginning to question whether I know what I am doing.
Having studied improvisational comedy, I’m aware that regardless of how I feel, it is wise to always validate others’ feelings. So I replied, “Yes, I should have asked you before I sold it.”
Afterward, I sent him some data to mull over.
Nasdaq just crawled its way back to 4000 a few days ago, and this time Apple is the biggest and hottest stock in the Nasdaq 100.
Last time when Nasdaq passed 4000, the top ten tech stocks (try saying that ten times fast) were, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, Qualcom, Oracle, JDSU, Nextel, Sun Micro, Veritas and MCI Worldcom.
Since the last time Nasdaq passed 4000, Microsoft has gone down 34%, Cisco 59%, Intel 53%, Qualcomm, the only up stock in the group, has gone up 25%, Oracal has gone down 67%, JDSU 98% and the remaining four are no longer in business; they were either merged out of existence or end ignominiously.
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It is exceedingly difficult for mutual funds to beat market indexes. For the past decade, Standard and Poor’s has methodologically documented returns by mutual funds and what they found is something those fund managers do not want you to know: the majority of mutual funds under-performed their respective indexes literally every single time.
Here is an infographic published by MoneySense, a Canadian financial magazine, that shows 90% of Canadian money managers under-performed the market index in 2012; I can assure you that US money managers are doing no better.
The Investment Scientist 