How to beat the share market

Become a United States senator. Their share portfolios out-perform the best of the best hedge fund managers, and the best hedge fund manager was paid 3 1/2 billion dollars last year; to get on the list for the top hedge fund manager, you make at least $300 million a year. Good things that politicians know how to outperform them on their modest salaries and busy schedules of public engagements and parliamentary sittings.

 

Using the financial disclosures of politicians, "Abnormal Returns From the Common Stock Investments of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives," built model portfolios and charted their performance. They found that House members outperform the market by 6 percentage points. Senators do even better, the authors say, citing their own earlier research from 2004.

Senate portfolios "show some of the highest excess returns ever recorded over a long period of time, significantly outperforming even hedge fund managers," with gains that are "both economically large and statistically significant."

These results suggest that congressmen and senators have access to non-public information on  particular businesses, industries or the economy as a whole and invest on  the basis that information. The good returns of Senators  and Congressmen last far too long to be no more than luck.


Who Routinely Trounces the U.S. Stock Market? Try 2 Out of 2,862 Funds – NYTimes.com

For the three years ended March 2014, 14.10% of large-cap funds, 16.32% of mid-cap funds and 25.00% of small-cap funds maintained a top-half ranking over three consecutive 12-month periods. Random expectations would suggest a rate of 25%.

After five years, two funds are still beating the market in each of the last five years.The rest of fallen by the wayside.

via Who Routinely Trounces the Stock Market? Try 2 Out of 2,862 Funds – NYTimes.com

Alchian and Allen on investment advisors (and currency speculation too)

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Merton Miller on beating the market

To beat the market you'll have to invest serious bucks to dig up information no one else has yet.  - Merton Miller

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Mutual fund facts and a question: Why are so many investors so willing to throw so much of their money away? | AEIdeas

index

The average expense ratio of actively managed equity mutual funds was 0.89% in 2013, which was more than seven times higher than the 0.12% average expense ratio for index equity funds. Some index mutual funds like the Vanguard S&P 500 Index have expense ratios as low as 0.05%.

via Mutual fund facts and a question: Why are so many investors so willing to throw so much of their money away? | AEIdeas.

Aside

The advantages of passive investing or indexed linked investing: the impact of costs and fees

Figure 1: Impact of costs on returns


Half of all invested assets will outperform the market return before costs. After costs, a much smaller portion outperforms the market return.

The indexing concept makes no judgment as to market efficiency, size, or style, nor does it need efficient markets to be effective: Every market will always have an average return, whether the market is deemed efficient or otherwise. Indexing works because

whether markets are efficient or inefficient, investors as a group must fall short of the market return by the amount of the costs they incur

Active investors in strategies are exposed to commissions, management fees, bid-ask spreads, administrative costs, taxes, liquidity constraints, and other costs. In 2008, French in “The Cost of Active Investing” analysed the total cost to investors who have hired active managers to be more than $100 billion:

Professor French notes that while the total cost of trying to beat the market has grown over the years, the percentage of individuals who bear this cost has declined — precisely because of the growing popularity of index funds.

From 1986 to 2006, according to his calculations, the proportion of the aggregate market cap that is invested in index funds more than doubled, to 17.9 percent. As a result, the negative-sum game played by active investors has grown ever more negative.

The bottom line is this: The best course for the average investor is to buy and hold an index fund for the long term. Even if you think you have compelling reasons to believe a particular trade could beat the market, the odds are still probably against you.

Figure 2: Percentage of active funds underperforming low-cost index funds, For the ten years ended December 31, 2013

Percentage of active funds underperforming low-cost index funds

HT: vanguard.com

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Merton Miller on active investing

Most people might just as well buy a share of the whole market, which pools all the information, than delude themselves into thinking they know something the market doesn't.  - Merton Miller

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Paul Krugman was a consultant to Enron

In 1999, Paul Krugman was paid $50,000 by Enron to act as a consultant and hold seminars. Krugman wrote a glowing article about Enron for Fortune magazine. After the collapse of Enron, he was a stern critic of that company.

In his columns, Krugman worked hard to link Enron to the Bush administration, and in one blamed Enron’s consultants for the company’s collapse. Krugman neglected to mention that he had been an Enron consultant:

Enron sold lots of things, but above all it sold itself: it crafted a self-portrait that business gurus loved. Like a schematic diagram from The McKinsey Quarterly or The Harvard Business Review, Enron’s business plan made a perfect PowerPoint presentation.

Other companies hired business gurus as consultants; Enron, in effect, put the gurus in charge. (Jeff Skilling, who made Enron what it is today, is a former McKinsey consultant.) What they created was a company so trendy that investors were dazzled. And that let executives get away with financial murder.

Eugene Fama on share market bubbles

Eugene fama

Q: I guess most people would define a bubble as an extended period during which asset prices depart quite significantly from economic fundamentals.

A: That’s what I would think it is, but that means that somebody must have made a lot of money betting on that, if you could identify it. It’s easy to say prices went down, it must have been a bubble, after the fact.

I think most bubbles are twenty-twenty hindsight. Now after the fact you always find people who said before the fact that prices are too high.

People are always saying that prices are too high. When they turn out to be right, we anoint them. When they turn out to be wrong, we ignore them.

They are typically right and wrong about half the time…

I want people to use the term in a consistent way. For example, I didn’t renew my subscription to The Economist because they use the world bubble three times on every page. Any time prices went up and down—I guess that is what they call a bubble. People have become entirely sloppy.

People have jumped on the bandwagon of blaming financial markets. I can tell a story very easily in which the financial markets were a casualty of the recession, not a cause of it.

via Interview with Eugene Fama : The New Yorker.

The quickening in creative destruction and CEO turnover

Print

HT: marginalrevolution

Piketty and Pension Fund Socialism

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Any attack on capitalism these days is a direct attack of the retirement savings of ordinary workers. We live in the age of  what Peter Drucker called pension fund socialism in 1976. As Drucker added in 1991:

The rise of pension funds as dominant owners and lenders represents one of the most startling power shifts in economic history.

The first modern pension fund was established in 1950 by General Motors.

Four decades later, pension funds control total assets of $2.5 trillion, divided about equally between common stocks and fixed-income securities. Demographics guarantee that these assets will grow aggressively for at least another ten years.

The majority of equity capital is owned by pension funds and other collective investment vehicles corralling the savings of ordinary people. Much of the rest of physical capital is owned by workers through home ownership.

In the age of human capital, 70-90% of all capital in the economy is human capital. The notion of unskilled workers labouring away with the capital supplied by the bosses is 19th century throwback.

The rentier rich has been long replaced by the working rich. They make their fortunes in their own life times – sometimes as business entrepreneurs, sometimes through rent-seeking.

It is also the age of specific human capital, with a proliferation of technologies and products. The rising specialisation of firms and their production inputs has forced firms to try harder to find those inputs that suit their needs best. Management has the task of finding the right inputs. The role and reward to managers has therefore risen.

When the rise in returns on investments in human capital is beneficial and desirable, and policies designed to deal with inequality must take account of its cause. Growth in education levels has been a significant source of rising wages, productivity, and living standards over the past century.

The initial impact of higher returns to human capital is wider inequality in earnings, but that impact becomes more muted and may be reversed over time as young people invest more in their human capital.

The rentier class has been replaced by the working rich. The evidence on the top 1% is most consistent with theories of superstars, skill biased technological change, greater scale and their interaction of these factors.

Individuals who are really good at making money can now apply their skills to larger amounts of capital and reach far larger audiences  and markets for their products and services. That favours CEOs, athletes, celebrities, corporate lawyers, successful entrepreneurs and other working rich Who have a skill  or talent that can be supplied at little cost on a much larger scale. Some have a special dark place in their hearts for people who earned their money through honest hard work.

A market in which prices always fully reflect available information is called efficient

Source: John Cochrane

A share market that jumps suddenly when there is news of change in economic corporate fortunes is efficient.

This means that an efficient market can be highly volatile because it is rapidly incorporating changes in information. An efficient market is a volatile market.

As for smart money managers beating an efficient market, John Cochrane explains:

…efficiency implies that trading rules — “buy when the market went up yesterday”– should not work.

The surprising result is that, when examined scientifically, trading rules, technical systems, market newsletters, and so on have essentially no power beyond that of luck to forecast stock prices.

This is not a theorem, an axiom, a philosophy, or a religion: it is an empirical prediction that could easily have come out the other way, and sometimes does.

Efficiency implies that professional managers should do no better than monkeys with darts. This prediction too bears out in the data.

It too could have come out the other way. It should have come out the other way! In any other field of human endeavour, seasoned professionals systematically outperform amateurs. But other fields are not as ruthlessly competitive as financial markets.

Crony capitalism flashback – who voted against the TARP in 2008?

The US House of Representatives initially voted down the TARP in a grand coalition of right-wing republicans and left-wing democrats, voting 205–228. The right-wing republicans opposed the bailout because capitalism is a profit AND loss system. Democrats voted 140–95 in favour of the Bill while Republicans voted 133–65 against it.

The chart above shows that the degree of risk in commercial loans made by TARP recipients appears to have increased. This is no surprise. In the 1960s, Sam Peltzman published a paper in in the 1960s showing that when deposit insurance was introduced in the USA in the 1930s, the banks halve their capital ratios. They did not need to have as much capital as before to back their lending. The chart below shows that the TARP really didn’t do much for economic policy uncertainty.

In an open letter sent to Congress, over 100 university economists described three fatal pitfalls in the TARP:

1) Its fairness. The plan is a subsidy to investors at taxpayers’ expense. Investors who took risks to earn profits must also bear the losses. The government can ensure a well-functioning financial industry without bailing out particular investors and institutions whose choices proved unwise.

2) Its ambiguity. Neither the mission of the new agency nor its oversight is clear. If taxpayers are to buy illiquid and opaque assets from troubled sellers, the terms, timing and methods of such purchases must be crystal clear ahead of time and carefully monitored afterwards.

3) Its long-term effects. If the plan is enacted, its effects will be with us for a generation. For all their recent troubles, America’s dynamic and innovative private capital markets have brought the nation unparalleled prosperity. Fundamentally weakening those markets in order to calm short-run disruptions is will short-sighted.

A recent IMF study of 42 systemic banking crises showed that in 32 cases, there was government financial intervention.

Of these 32 cases where the government recapitalised the banking system, only seven included a programme of purchase of bad assets/loans (like the one proposed by the US Treasury). These countries were Mexico, Japan, Bolivia, Czech Republic, Jamaica, Malaysia, and Paraguay.

The Government purchase of bad assets was the exception rather than the rule in banking crises and rightly so. The TARP mostly benefited bank shareholders. A case of privatising the gains and socialising the losses from banking was passed on the votes of Congressional Democrats.

The share market speaks on renewable energy

To avert a financial panic, central banks should lend early and freely to solvent banks against good collateral but at penal rates

First. That these loans should only be made at a very high rate of interest. This will operate as a heavy fine on unreasonable timidity, and will prevent the greatest number of applications by persons who do not require it. The rate should be raised early in the panic, so that the fine may be paid early; that no one may borrow out of idle precaution without paying well for it; that the Banking reserve may be protected as far as possible.

Secondly. That at this rate these advances should be made on all good banking securities, and as largely as the public ask for them. The reason is plain. The object is to stay alarm, and nothing therefore should be done to cause alarm. But the way to cause alarm is to refuse some one who has good security to offer… No advances indeed need be made by which the Bank will ultimately lose. The amount of bad business in commercial countries is an infinitesimally small fraction of the whole business…

The great majority, the majority to be protected, are the ‘sound’ people, the people who have good security to offer. If it is known that the Bank of England is freely advancing on what in ordinary times is reckoned a good security—on what is then commonly pledged and easily convertible—the alarm of the solvent merchants and bankers will be stayed. But if securities, really good and usually convertible, are refused by the Bank, the alarm will not abate, the other loans made will fail in obtaining their end, and the panic will become worse and worse.

Walter Bagehot Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (1873).

The classical theory of the lender of last resort stressed

(1) protecting the aggregate money stock, not individual institutions,

(2) letting insolvent institutions fail,

(3) accommodating sound but temporarily illiquid institutions only,

(4) charging penalty rates,

(5) requiring good collateral, and

(6) preannouncing these conditions in advance of crises so as to remove uncertainty.

Did anyone follow these rules in the global financial crisis? The Fed violated the classical model in at least seven ways:

  1. Emphasis on Credit (Loans) as Opposed to Money
  2. Taking Junk Collateral
  3. Charging Subsidy Rates
  4. Rescuing Insolvent Firms Too Big and Interconnected to Fail
  5. Extension of Loan Repayment Deadlines
  6. No Pre-announced Commitment
  7. No Clear Exit Strategy

…{the Fed’s} policies are hardly benign, and that extension of central bank assistance to insolvent too-big-to-fail firms at below-market rates on junk-bond collateral may, besides the uncertainty, inefficiency, and moral hazard it generates, bring losses to the Fed and the taxpayer, all without compensating benefits. Worse still, it is a probable prelude to a severe inflation and to future crises dwarfing the current one.

Thomas Humphrey (2010)

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