Reblog: To Be a Great Investor, Worry More About Being Wrong Than Right


If you were a Hillary Clinton supporter, every statement by Donald Trump fortified your faith that he would lose the election, and you took the consensus of polls as proof she would win. Mr. Trump gave supporters reason to think he’d chasten Wall Street, and as the election approached, pundits predicted a market meltdown if Mr. Trump won. Yet the S&P 500 has returned more than 5% since his election.

Ever since Nov. 8, voters have been scrambling from all sides to avoid admitting that we were wrong. If that requires fibbing to ourselves, so be it.

Likewise, instead of opening their minds to the possibility of being wrong, investors often wall themselves off from new information that could threaten their views.

When the U.S. stock market produced its worst start to a year in modern history, losing 10.5% in January and early February, terms like “contagion,” “panic” and “fear and loathing” filled the air. Stocks promptly shot up.

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stockarchitect November 28, 2018

Jason Zweig / Wall Street Journal /

Reblog: Burton Malkiel – How to Invest in an Overpriced World


Here’s a great article at the WSJ by Burton Malkiel, author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street and Chief Investment Officer of Wealthfront. Malkiel provides two strategies that might be worth considering in an overpriced world saying:

“What, then, can an investor do to control risk? The two strategies that work are broad diversification and rebalancing.”

Here’s an excerpt from that article:

What should an investor do when all asset classes appear overpriced? The 10-year U.S. Treasury bond currently yields about 2.6%, much lower than the 5% historical average and only slightly higher than the Federal Reserve’s 2% inflation target. Yields of lower-quality bonds are unusually meager compared with those of traditionally safe Treasurys.

For equities, the cycle-adjusted price/earnings ratio, or CAPE—the valuation metric that does the best job in predicting future 10-year rates of return—is about 34. That’s one of the highest valuations ever, exceeded only by the readings in 1929 and early 2000, prior to crashes. Today’s CAPE suggests that the 10-year equity rate of return will be barely positive.

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stockarchitect September 5, 2018

Burton Malkiel / CAPE ratio / Investing strategy / Jack Bogle / Wall Street Journal / WSJ /

Reblog: Risk Is Not High Math


Smead Capital Management letter to investors  titled,”Risk Is Not High Math.”

Dear fellow investors,

Long term success in common stock ownership is much more about patience and discipline than it is about mathematics. There is no better arena for discussing this truism than in how investors measure risk. It is the opinion of our firm that measuring a portfolio’s variability to an index is ridiculous, because it is impossible to beat the index without variability.

We believe that how you measure risk is at the heart of how well you do as a long-duration owner of better than average quality companies. In a recent interview, Warren Buffett explained that pension and other perpetuity investors are literally dooming themselves by owning bond investments that are guaranteed to produce a return well below the obligations they hope to meet.

Buffett defines investing as postponing the use of purchasing power today to have more purchasing power in the future. For that reason, we see the risk in common stock ownership as a combination of three things; What other liquid asset classes can produce during the same time period, how the stock market does during the time period, and how well your selections do in comparison to those options. Why would professional investors mute long-term returns in a guaranteed way? The answer comes from how you define risk.

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stockarchitect July 23, 2018

Charlie Munger / Morningstar / Risk / S&P 500 / Smead Capital Management / valuewalk.com / Wall Street Journal / Warren Buffet / William Smead /