Tag: diamond hands

Columns · investing · The book

Does Your Index Fund Have “Diamond Hands?”

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Yes, these are Roaring Kitty’s hands

Anybody who has read my first book knows that I take a mostly dim view of active management. Still, this week I wrote about an episode central to my upcoming book that proves an exception: how active managers handled meme stocks.

When the market values of GameStop, and AMC went up several hundred or thousand percent based on no change in their fundamental value, active fund managers did the obvious thing – they dumped them and moved on. But index funds, which tend to beat those active managers in the long run, held tight with “diamond hands” because they have to. In some cases they bought more at inflated valuations as their assets grew or as those companies issued shares to their now almost entirely retail base of owners. The only passive investor I’m aware of that was able to take the money and run was Dimensional Fund Advisors (I interviewed their deputy head of portfolio management, Mary Phillips, for the column). Even today, with their share prices (in my opinion) still grossly elevated, the main owners of the meme stocks are the self-described “apes,” many of whom believe there is still a short squeeze looming because of phantom shares.

Active fund managers shouldn’t look a gift primate in the mouth. The last year that funds benchmarked to the Morningstar Large Blend category outperformed that benchmark was in 2013 and before that it was 2009, according to a study by Hartford Funds. Index funds have strung together several consecutive winning years over their active counterparts during extended bull markets in the past, too—for example between 1994 and 1999.

This is one of those cases when owning an index fund can be frustrating. As of today, the top two holdings in the Russell 2000 Value Index – let me repeat, “value” – are AMC and Avis Budget Group, another company that recently got the meme treatment for discussing the addition of electric vehicles to its fleet. Whatever.

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Meme Stock Bosses Continue an Old Tradition

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Meme stocks like AMC and GameStop might be new, but their executives are continuing a very old Wall Street tradition: Making hay while the sun shines. You’ve probably read that insiders have sold tens of millions of shares, or “gifted” them to family members in cases when they weren’t allowed to sell, but they also have raised billions of dollars from enthusiastic retail investors.

I wrote about this for today’s Wall Street Journal. The whole #Apestogetherstrong and “diamond hands” schtick is new, but executives have long taken advantage of temporarily overvalued equity to buy competitors. Cisco’s value grew 2,000 fold during the dot-com boom and AOL bought the world’s largest media company with it in 2000. Back in the 1960s, “conglomerateurs” used their companies high growth and lofty P/E ratios to buy more growth with dozens of acquisitions of unrelated companies.

An article in The Saturday Evening Post in 1968, at the height of the boom, was titled: “It Is Theoretically Possible for the Entire United States to Become One Vast Conglomerate Presided Over by Mr. James L. Ling.”

The whole thing fell apart between 1968 and 1970 or so. This will too, but the value of the money raised and whatever it buys, or whatever debts it pays off, is real. Selling shares or using them to buy something can make a corporation more valuable. The math only works at the expense of late-arriving true-believers, though, whose contribution is diluted over the existing shareholder base.