Reblog: Waiting for the Market to Crash is a Terrible Strategy


In my experience, investors sitting on a lot of cash are usually worried about equity valuations or the economy, and tell themselves and others that they’re going to buy gobs of stock after a crash. The strategy sounds prudent and has common sense appeal—everyone knows that one should be fearful when others are greedy, greedy when others are fearful. But historically waiting for the market to fall has been an abysmal strategy, far worse than buying and holding in both absolute and risk-adjusted terms.

Using monthly U.S. stock market total returns from mid-1926 to 2016-end (from the ever-useful French Data Library), I simulated variations of the strategy, changing both the drawdown thresholds before buying and the holding periods after a buy. For example, a simple version of the strategy is to wait for a 10% peak-to-trough loss before buying, then holding for at least 12 months or until the drawdown threshold is exceeded before returning to cash. This strategy would have put you in cash about 47% of the time, so if our switches were random, we’d expect to earn about half the market return with half the volatility.

The chart below shows the cumulative excess return (that is, return above cash) of this variation of the strategy versus the market. Buy-the-dip returned 2.2% annualized with a 15.7% annualized standard deviation, while buy-and-hold returned 6.3% with an 18.6% standard deviation. Their respective Sharpe ratios, a measure of risk-adjusted return, are 0.14 and 0.34, meaning for each percentage point of volatility buy-the-dip yielded 0.14% in additional annualized return and buy-and-hold yielded 0.34%.

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Reblog: The Stock Market Is Only As Smart As the Investors Who Comprise It


A Buy and Hold friend of mine recently posted the following words to the discussion thread for one of my blog entries: “You’re confusing high valuations (a fact, historically speaking) with overvaluations (a judgement that the market is wrong, in effect that you’re smarter than Wall Street).

I like the comment because it concisely and clearly reveals the primary difference between Buy and Hold believers and Valuation-Informed Indexers. It is absolutely correct to say that I believe that the market is wrong. That’s the entire idea of Valuation-Informed Indexing. We can know when the market is getting things wrong and how off the mark the market is and we should put that knowledge to good use by adjusting our stock allocations accordingly.

My Buy and Hold friend dismisses out of hand the possibility that the market has gotten things wrong. His comment suggests that the market is comprised largely of Wall Street experts who possess more knowledge about the value of stocks than I possess. So I should just give up this effort to outsmart the market.

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Some of the winners from the week gone by


StockArchitect is a platform that works. It helps investors take an informed decision based on the collective views of others.

Here are some of the winners of the week that just went by.

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Does Stock Architect Work? Here is the evidence!!!


Stock Architect is a startup, waking up again after a hiatus. We are happy to be a place where leaders from the stock market come together using the power of the internet to serve each other through sharing, networking and collective learning. Our aim is to become a place for traders and investors to get up to speed on market-moving information and insights which drive real-time changes in the investor mood and sentiment.

When we discuss the concept, people often ask us – How do I make money? Does it work? All the doubting Thomases and nay sayers have a field day. We, therefore, culled information from the tweets on the website and looked at different recommendations. The result was astounding. We just looked at Ceat Ltd. & BF Utilities, stocks recommended as buys. Given below is the summary:

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