Behavioral finance combines the study of human behavior and cognitive psychology with traditional economic and financial theory to explain why people make irrational decisions that can lead to investment mistakes, including the mispricing of assets (which are called anomalies). The field has gained an increasing amount of attention in academia over the past 15 years…
Anna Cieslak and Pavol Povala—authors of the paper “Expected Returns in Treasury Bonds,” which was published in the September 2015 issue of The Review of Financial Studies—examined the time variation in the risk premium that investors require for holding Treasury bonds. While most of the authors’ analysis relies on data starting in 1971 (when data…
For many market observers and participants, billionaire Seth Klarman resides in the same “ZIP code” that Warren Buffett once called the home of superstar investors: “Graham and Doddsville.” Klarman is the well-regarded founder and CEO of the Baupost Group, a Boston-based private investment partnership with nearly $30 billion in assets under management. He has also…
In a series of previous articles on Seth Klarman’s book, “Margin of Safety: Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor,” I showed how his statement that indexing assures mediocre returns was very clearly incorrect. I demonstrated as well that many of his additional contentions about indexing and market efficiency were also false. Today I’ll…
Professors Eugene Fama and Kenneth French have a new paper, “Incremental Variables and the Investment Opportunity Set,” that provides some important insights for investors considering funds designed to supply exposure to multiple factors, or styles, of investing. In their study, they note: “Much asset pricing research is a search for variables that improve understanding of…
In a podcast interview posted last week, Tim O’Neill, global co-head of Goldman Sachs’ investment management division, warned investors that if passive investing gets too big, the market won’t work. He then added: “So in terms of the size, a market needs both active and passive investing, because if everybody’s a passive investor, there’s no…
Every January, I put together a list of predictions that financial “gurus” have made for the upcoming year, especially the ones that gain consensus as “sure things.” I then keep track of whether these “sure thing” forecasts actually came to pass, through a series of periodic updates. The inevitable turn of the calendar into October…
My book, “Investment Mistakes Even Smart Investors Make and How to Avoid Them,” covered 77 common errors I believe investors commit all too often. I know today there’s at least one more I should have included: discussing individual stock buys or sells at the water cooler. Evidence from the field of psychology emphasizes the strength…
The midyear S&P Indices Versus Active (SPIVA) domestic scorecard provides another example of why (at least when it comes to the overall results of active management relative to appropriate benchmarks) the past is, in fact, prologue. Let’s review some of the highlights from the June 2015 scorecard. The table below shows the percentage of active…
As I observe in my book, “Think, Act, and Invest Like Warren Buffett,” one of the great anomalies in investing is that while investors idolize Warren Buffett, they tend to ignore his advice, especially when it comes to efforts to time the market. The following are just a few of his many “words of wisdom”…
Contrary to what most investors believe, empirical studies of corporate bond premia have found that only a small fraction of observed credit spreads can be explained by expected losses from defaults. For example, research has found that the contemporaneous return of the S&P 500 Index is highly significant when determining the changes in credit spreads…
In 1981, Sanjoy Basu’s paper, “The Relationship Between Earnings’ Yield, Market Value and Return for NYSE Common Stocks,” found that the positive relationship between the earnings yield (E/P) and average return is left unexplained by market beta. Then, in 1985, Barr Rosenberg, Kenneth Reid and Ronald Lanstein uncovered the positive relationship between average stock returns…
The success of the Yale Endowment has been highly publicized, leading many endowments, foundations and more recently, even high net worth individuals, to consider adopting the so-called Yale Model. The Yale Model includes a focus on alternative investments and attempts to capture the liquidity premium available in illiquid investments (such as private equity). In addition…
There is an overwhelming body of evidence demonstrating that active management is a loser’s game when it comes to both stock and bond investing. The evidence led author Charles Ellis to call active management just that—a loser’s game—because while it’s possible to win, the odds of doing so are so poor that it isn’t prudent…
In my previous post, we reviewed the historical evidence on bear markets and financial crises, as well as the sources of the latest crisis. Today, we pick up by discussing reasons why all the bad news you’ve been hearing doesn’t mean you should reduce your equity allocation. Reasons Not To Panic First, all this news…
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