I use a hurdle rate which I need to cross if I need to justify the time and effort I spend on investing actively, rather than using a mechanical approach of rupee cost averaging (using an ETF or an index fund)
A rupee cost averaging approach of investing Rs 1000/- per month, every month for the last 10 years would have lead to an average return of around 15% per annum (As an added factor, I added a filter of stopping the plan when the market P/E exceeded 25. I added this filter to ensure that I would avoid putting money in the market when the market seemed overpriced by a decent margin).
This strategy would work even better with a mutual fund with a good long term record of beating the market by a resonable margin (resonable being +3% above market return over a period of 5 years or more).
So in effect if the portfolio of stocks picked by me, does not exceed this hurdle rate of 15% per annum (for a rolling cycle of 5 years and not for every year), then it would not justify the time and the effort.
Luckily till date I have exceeded this rate. But the results are not conclusive, because it could be due to dumb luck. I would consider the results to be conclusive only if I can achieve this kind of outperformance for a period of 10 years or more.
The World According to “Poor Charlie”
Found this great interview with charlie munger. Some interesting excerpts from the interview
How much of your success is from investing and how much from managing businesses?
Understanding how to be a good investor makes you a better business manager and vice versa.
Warren’s way of managing businesses does not take a lot of time. I would bet that something like half of our business operations have never had the foot of Warren Buffet in them. It’s not a very burdensome type of business management.
The business management record of Warren is pretty damn good, and I think it’s frequently underestimated. He is a better business executive for spending no time engaged in micromanagement.
Your book takes a very multi-disciplinary approach. Why?
It’s very useful to have a good grasp of all the big ideas in hard and soft science. A, it gives perspective. B, it gives a way for you to organize and file away experience in your head, so to speak.
How important is temperament in investing?
A lot of people with high IQs are terrible investors because they’ve got terrible temperaments. And that is why we say that having a certain kind of temperament is more important than brains. You need to keep raw irrational emotion under control. You need patience and discipline and an ability to take losses and adversity without going crazy. You need an ability to not be driven crazy by extreme success.
How should most individual investors invest?
Our standard prescription for the know-nothing investor with a long-term time horizon is a no-load index fund. I think that works better than relying on your stock broker. The people who are telling you to do something else are all being paid by commissions or fees. The result is that while index fund investing is becoming more and more popular, by and large it’s not the individual investors that are doing it. It’s the institutions.
What about people who want to pick stocks?
You’re back to basic Ben Graham, with a few modifications. You really have to know a lot about business. You have to know a lot about competitive advantage. You have to know a lot about the maintainability of competitive advantage. You have to have a mind that quantifies things in terms of value. And you have to be able to compare those values with other values available in the stock market. So you’re talking about a pretty complex body of knowledge.
What do you think of the efficient market theory, which holds that at any one time all knowledge by everyone about a stock is reflected in the price?
I think it is roughly right that the market is efficient, which makes it very hard to beat merely by being an intelligent investor. But I don’t think it’s totally efficient at all. And the difference between being totally efficient and somewhat efficient leaves an enormous opportunity for people like us to get these unusual records. It’s efficient enough, so it’s hard to have a great investment record. But it’s by no means impossible. Nor is it something that only a very few people can do. The top three or four percent of the investment management world will do fine.
What would a good investor’s portfolio look like? Would it look like the average mutual fund with 2% positions?
Not if they were doing it Munger style. The Berkshire-style investors tend to be less diversified than other people. The academics have done a terrible disservice to intelligent investors by glorifying the idea of diversification. Because I just think the whole concept is literally almost insane. It emphasizes feeling good about not having your investment results depart very much from average investment results. But why would you get on the bandwagon like that if somebody didn’t make you with a whip and a gun?
Should people be investing more abroad, particularly in emerging markets?
Different foreign cultures have very different friendliness to the passive shareholder from abroad. Some would be as reliable as the United States to invest in, and others would be way less reliable. Because it’s hard to quantify which ones are reliable and why, most people don’t think about it at all. That’s crazy. It’s a very important subject. Assuming China grows like crazy, how much of the proceeds of that growth are going to flow through to the passive foreign owners of Chinese stock? That is a very intelligent question that practically nobody asks.
Ibbotson finds 10% average returns back to 1926, and Jeremy Siegel has found roughly the same back to 1802.
Jeremy Siegel’s numbers are total balderdash. When you go back that long ago, you’ve got a different bunch of companies. You’ve got a bunch of railroads. It’s a different world. I think it’s like extrapolating human development by looking at the evolution of life from the worm on up. He’s a nut case. There wasn’t enough common stock investment for the ordinary person in 1880 to put in your eye.
Are you an expert ?
Found this new article from ‘Michael J. Mauboussin‘ from Legg Mason capital management ( Links to his other articles can be found on the sidebar and his website).
A highly relevant article for an investor, especially if one is looking at improving his expertise (not necessarily trying to become an expert)
Found the following excerpts very interesting (emphasis mine, comments in italics)
- What it takes to become an expert appears remarkably consistent across domains. In field after field, researchers find expertise requires many years of deliberate practice. Most people don’t become experts because they don’t put in the time.
- Experts train their experiential system. Repeated practice allows experts to internalize many facets of their domain, freeing cognitive capacity.
- Intuition is only reliable in stable environments. In domains that are nonlinear or nonstationary, intuition is much less useful.
- Expert investors exist. Unfortunately, it is not clear that their skill sets are transferable. Expert investors are likely a product of both mental hard wiring and hard work.
And
Experts are not casual about their domain. They build their lives around deliberate practice and practice every day, including weekends. But experts also report sleep and rest as critical elements of their results, and they avoid overtraining or overexertion. Evidence shows that performance diminution in cognitive tasks coincides more with reductions in deliberate practice than with aging.
As it turns out, expertise requires about ten years, or ten to twenty thousand hours of deliberate practice. Little evidence exists for expert performance before ten years of practice. 3 Even prodigies like Bobby Fischer (chess), Amadeus Mozart (music) and Wayne Gretzky (sports) required a decade of practice to generate world class results – So I have a long way to go. But I enjoy the process of learning, so it is both fun and profitable
Expected value and value to be expected
I saw this concept in the book ‘A mathematician plays the stock market’ which I am reading currently and liked the explaination and its relevance to me as an investor.
Expected value is essentially the sum of product of gain/losses from an investment and the associated probabilities. The expected value is the most likely result from an investment.
Let me explain
Let us consider a stock S. I have reasons to believe that the stock would decrease in value by 10%, with a 80% probability. At the same time, there is a long shot product if successful could result in bumper profits and could increase the stock price by 100%. However the chances are just 20% for this event.
So in the above scenario the expected value from the stock is = (-10%)*.8+(+100%)*.2 = 12%
However value most likely result to be expected from such as stock (atleast 80% of the time) is a return of –10%.
A large group of positive ‘expected value’ investment with negative ‘value to be expected’ should be profitable over a period of time. This is same as the principle of arbitrage or value investing from ben graham. The above concept is also critical if one is dealing with options. For example, sellers of put options have a negative expected value (sometimes very high), but a small positive ‘value to be expected’.
So next time if some analyst talks of a positive ‘value to be expected’, you may want to check the assumptions and figure out the ‘expected value’ of the recommendation