Category: investing

The Curse of Star Managers
Columns · investing

The Curse of Star Managers

SJLeave a comment

I edit more and write less these days, but even when I do write I often forget to link to it here. I’ll try to be better in 2021.

One thing I wrote recently generated an unusual amount of reader email, split about 40-60 between congratulatory and outraged. I said that star fund managers are to be avoided and I used the example of Cathie Wood, whose main exchange traded fund at ARK Invest grew assets by 1,000% last year and gained nearly 160%. She bet big and won on hot stocks like Tesla and biotechs that benefitted from Covid-19 speculation.

I am apparently a misogynist or don’t understand her genius or both. Anyway, the evidence is pretty strong that jumping on the bandwagon once a fund manager graces magazine covers isn’t a great idea whether that manager has a “Y” chromosome or not. You can read more about managers like Ken Heebner and Bill Miller in my book.

The column starts out with a “famous last words” puff piece from The Motley Fool titles “Move Over, Warren Buffett : This Is the Star Investor You Should Be Following.”

So read the headline on a year-end article from retail investing advice site Motley Fool touting the performance of fund manager Cathie Wood. Variations on the “Buffett is done” theme have been around since at least the tech bubble, while the cult of star mutual-fund managers goes back to the 1960s. Such commentators have eventually eaten their words.

Ms. Wood is a savvy businesswoman, but is she a savvy investor? Stock picking skill is very rare and even harder to discern when the manager is riding a hot category. In a bull market propelled by dumb retail money, everyone is a genius. It takes many years to establish whether success is random. And, as I point out, star manager’s performance is often worse than random on the downside. The most promising active funds are those that lagged their peers recently or got a low rating from a firm like Morningstar.

Fund managers are often compared with dart-throwing monkeys. That might be too flattering for those who get the most attention. Hot funds’ performance is often worse than random on the downside. A regularly updated study on the persistence of investor performance from S&P Dow Jones Indices shows that just 0.18% of domestic equity funds in the top quartile of performance in 2015 maintained that through each of the next four years—less than half what one would have expected by pure chance. And of course most actively managed funds lag behind the index to which they are benchmarked because of fees and taxes.

Anyway, the tone of the emails has made me more convinced that some investors in “disruptive innovators” have lost touch with reality. Congrats if you were early — the fund’s performance is pretty impressive (see chart below) — and be careful if you were late.

Columns · investing

Bear Markets

SJLeave a comment

With apologies to Stanley Kubrick, I titled my latest Heard essay “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bear Market.“

It sounds a bit flippant at a time when so many people are seeing their nest eggs melt down on paper, but the message is important. Retail investors lag the market significantly because of timing errors and the biggest mistakes are made at junctures like these. If the 20% bounce from the coronavirus-fueled low turns out to be a dead cat bounce then it will stoke further pessimism and cause people to either sell or to have less of their wealth in risky assets such as stocks once the eventual turn comes.

I’d love to tell you when that turn will be, but I can’t and neither can anyone else. The important thing to remember, though, is that if you were comfortable having, say, 70% of your nest egg in stocks when the Dow was knocking on the door of 30,000 then you should feel the same way at 20,000 or (gulp) 15,000. The richest gains of the next bull market (no, I don’t think this recent bounce was the start of one) probably will come early on. They always have before.

For example, if you put $100,000 into a plain vanilla U.S. index fund at the very start of the last bull market in March 2009 and had sold at last month’s peak then you’d have $630,000 including dividends. If you had decided to wait three months to make sure it wasn’t another false alarm then you’d have just $450,000.

Bad times are surprisingly good. If you could go back in a time machine and buy stocks at the bottom of every bear market of the past 90 years but had to sell as soon as a recession had officially ended then your annualized return would be a whopping 64%. You would never have lagged the market’s long-run return.

And what if you really can’t sleep at night? Well that’s okay – Covid-19 is enough to worry about! But then you should do one of two things. One would be to dial back the risk you take permanently – no cheating the next time everyone around you is getting rich on pot stocks or whatever the next fad will be. You’ll be that much older and closer to retirement then anyway. The other would be to entrust your money to someone else like a reputable fee-only adviser or a robo-advisor like Betterment or Wealthfront and just check it as infrequently as possible.

Why should you (sort of) like bear markets? Because they’re the time when your attitude can make you a superior investor. Everyone is a genius in a bull market, but tough times are when your mettle matters – no finance degree or superior IQ required. When those glossy brochures from a brokerage firm tell you that the long run return of stocks is 9.6% or whatever, those returns include bear markets that have seen portfolios cut in half or worse.

That’s my usual spiel, which you can read about at length in my book as well, but it’s when I finish giving it and emphasize that nobody on Wall Street knows anything that someone inevitably asks what I think about the market anyway.

I used to get paid a lot to tell people which stocks to buy. Now I get paid a more modest sum to write and edit articles about the same thing. It doesn’t mean you should listen to me about what or when to buy. But, for whatever you may think it’s worth, I’m pretty pessimistic at the moment. If I hold to form then I’ll still be pessimistic when the turning point is reached and we all should be buying stock funds like crazy.

investing · The book

You Named Your Fund What?

SJLeave a comment

Back when I was writing my book, I decided to start a chapter on the wild, wacky, and frequently value-destroying world of “alternative investments” by playing around with the Hedge Fund Name Generator. It usually combines a color, a geographic feature and a corporate moniker. For example, I just came up with “Red Road Partners.”

For the purposes of the book, I kept trying until it spit out some bizarre or offensive sounding ones like YellowRoad Associates, SolidOcean Markets and, best/worst of all, Black Street Brothers.

The fashion used to be names from Greek mythology and I wrote a LinkedIn post a while back, Letter From a Failing Hedge Fund Manager, in which the author’s fund was called Oedipus Capital. But while you use up the acceptable classical names pretty quickly, the current trend has a ways to go. Just do the math: Six primary or secondary colors times 30 geographic features times seven corporate types gives you 1,260 fund names — way more than you’ll glean from the index in Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. Throw in street or town names and you have tens of thousands of choices.

But we have now jumped the fund name shark. An article today by my colleague Cara Lombardo is titled: “Far Point To Buy Global Blue From Silver Lake.”

Doesn’t this confuse people? “Hey man, was I supposed to wire that billion dollars to Golden Lake or Silver Lake?” Isn’t it at least getting a bit old? I know that there is some reflected glory here — BlackRock and what have you — but how about just gaming the system the way the way a plumber does to get to the top of the listings in the Yellow Pages: “2 & 20 Management” or “AAA Amazing Returns Capital?”

Alternatively, just get to the point. “Gigantic Stacks of Money Partners,” for example. It isn’t like there are truth in advertising rules for hedge funds. One of the best funds ever, by the way — though it existed only on paper — was Andrew Lo’s “Capital Decimation Partners.” It gained 2,560% over seven years, though it contained the seeds of its own destruction because it simply sold out-of-the-money puts. In today’s return-hungry world, I bet he could start a real fund, name it that, point out in bold text how it could all end in tears, and still attract huge inflows. What a time to be alive!

investing

Can Glampers Save RV Makers?

SJLeave a comment

I wrote about the RV industry again. It’s a fascinating business, and apparently I’m not the only one who thinks so if online reader engagement is any indication.

One thing you’ll notice immediately about RV life is that the buyers and enthusiasts are mostly white baby boomers, but that’s changing.

Walk around a typical RV park and you’ll meet mostly white baby boomers lounging around hulking vehicles that offer nearly all the comforts of home. Look at the glossy reports of a recreational-vehicle manufacturer such as Winnebago Industries or a retailer such as Camping World Holdings, though, and you’ll see fit, outdoorsy millennials, families with children and racial minorities in rugged, picturesque locales.

That imagery isn’t pure marketing fiction—younger, more diverse buyers have embraced glamping and #vanlife in the past decade, helping to boost interest in RVs—especially lightweight, towable models. The industry needs a lot more where that came from after enduring a second year of slumping sales with forecasts for another dip in 2020. 



investing

Billion, trillion, schmillion

SJLeave a comment

Don’t tell you know who, but, by some measures, the $2 trillion valuation of Aramco only puts it in fairly middling company.

Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman wanted to see his country’s crown jewel, Saudi Arabian Oil Co., or Aramco, valued at $2 trillion. Market reality got in the way and he had to settle for a mere $1.7 trillion in last week’s initial public offering, which also was limited to regional investors.

But the first day of trading Wednesday saw the shares limit up—a rise of 10% on the local Tadawul exchange. Another performance like that—and strong social and financial incentives not to sell make that a distinct possibility—will see the sought-after $2 trillion mark breached.

Looked at another way, though, the company’s value is absolutely pedestrian. Aramco’s 1.5% free float means shares owned by the public are worth only $28 billion. By contrast, Microsoft and Apple have floats worth $1.08 trillion and $1.06 trillion, respectively, if one excludes insiders.

In the energy world, North American exploration and production companies Occidental Petroleum, Marathon Petroleum and Canadian Natural Resources are all larger on this metric. Super major Exxon Mobil has a float worth 10 times as much as Aramco at nearly $300 billion.

Now that is a princely sum.

Columns · investing

The Oracle of Qaqortoq

SJLeave a comment

On his 89th birthday, I asked a question that the Oracle of Omaha is well-equipped to answer: How would we value Greenland?

Warren Buffett ’s 89th birthday is a good occasion to revisit a question that has been weighing on financial minds lately—what price to put on Greenland.
As far as we know, President Trump hasn’t contacted the Oracle of Omaha on the question of valuation, much less negotiating tips. But one of Mr. Buffett’s earliest letters to investors has an interesting way to think about such outlays. He quipped that Queen Isabella of Spain, who gave Christopher Columbus the equivalent of $30,000 to find the New World, could have instead invested it at 4% interest and had $2 trillion by 1963—nearly $18 trillion today.
Denmark spurned an offer from President Harry Truman of $100 million in 1946 to sell Greenland. It is unlikely that a then-17-year-old Buffett, already a budding value investor, would have made the offer. The same sum invested in the S&P 500 would have compounded since then, with dividends reinvested, to a whopping $163 billion.

Denmark may have missed a huge opportunity, but don’t judge too harshly—the future author of “The Art of the Deal” was only born that year.

Columns · investing

Buy the “Wrong” Stock, Hit the Jackpot

SJLeave a comment

I wrote about the phenomenon of tech stock doppelgängers showering riches on people who can act quickly, but mostly parting fools from their money.

Zoom Technologies is carrying on a long American tradition: making people rich by accident.

Not to be confused with Zoom Video Communications, a unicorn that went public in April, making its backers truly wealthy, the similarly named penny stock appears to have benefited from mistaken identity. A $1,000 investment in late March would have been worth over half a million dollars by mid-April. Even now, assuming one were able to find a buyer, it would be worth $175,000.

Zoom joins the likes of doppelgangers Tweeter and Snap Interactive. Similarly confusing episodes happened in the last tech bull market. For example, penny stock Appian Technology surged by nearly 19,000% because it shared a ticker with a hot initial public offering on Nasdaq, AppNet, in 1999.

Of course all of these scenarios enriched people already owning the shares of the “wrong” company, and only if they acted quickly. Buyers fooled by similar names or tickers usually regret it. Not always, though. Mistaken buyers of food company Sysco back in March 2000—when red-hot Cisco Systems briefly the world’s most valuable company—have made 571% since then compared with a loss of 12% by owning the “correct” stock.

investing

Is Crypto Ready for Stephen Moore?

SJLeave a comment

If you can’t beat’ em, join ‘em. And if you can’t join ‘em?

Pundit Stephen Moore withdrew last month from consideration for a position on the Federal Reserve Board. Now he is joining a group that wants to “perform Fed-like duties,” but not for traditional money. He will, according to Fox Business, join Decentral, which aspires to be “the world’s decentralized central bank,” performing a stabilizing role for cryptocurrency.

This raises a few questions. Bitcoin, the most valuable cryptocurrency, is hugely volatile in dollar terms, but its supply is famously limited by design. Its appeal lies in the lack of a central bank.

But supposing Mr. Moore’s outfit were able to stabilize values, would it be hawkish or dovish? Back when Barack Obama sat in the White House, Mr. Moore decried the Fed’s “easy money policy” as the recipe for the next crisis and advocated a return to the gold standard. When he was hoping to be nominated by Donald Trump, though, he advocated cutting rates by half.

Crypto investors eager to see their purchasing power maintained would prefer the 2015 version of Stephen Moore.

Columns · investing · journalism

In a galaxy far, far, away

SJLeave a comment

The column I edit, Heard on the Street, has to find one mildly ridiculous business story for each issue of the paper, in addition to all the serious, analytical stuff. This usually isn’t a challenge, though there are occasional droughts when we have to dig deep.

Thank goodness for people like Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com. He is a gift to seekers of corporate hilarity and I was a bit mean to him today.


Patrick Byrne felt a great disturbance among his shareholders, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out for an explanation. This compelled the chief executive officer of Overstock.com to write one of the more bizarre news releases in recent memory about his reasons for selling 900,000 “founder’s shares” of the retailer.
“Frankly, I had no idea that shareholders would demand explanations of why and how I might want to use my cash derived from my labor and my property to pursue my ends in life,” he wrote.
Mr. Byrne detailed a number of personal projects, including charitable causes, for which he needed the cash. Even after all these years, he is most famous for a different rant about an alleged conspiracy to damage Overstock’s share price involving a “Sith Lord.” Mr. Byrne backed efforts to expose and punish allegedly manipulative short sellers.


Despite some spikes in the share price, the short sellers were basically right. Since the 2005 “Sith Lord” speech, the stock has dropped by 77% compared with a 133% gain for the S&P 500.
Perhaps Mr. Byrne should have directed more energy to running the company. Do or do not. There is no try.