The 3 Cs Dangers – Weekly Blog #534

Consultants, Career Risks, and Cash can hurt professional money managers as well as many individual investors who think like “the Pros”

Consultants
A recent Financial Times column by John Authers starts off by recognizing that it is hard, but necessary, to accept the responsibility for mistakes. It is the reason that many investment committees and other fiduciaries hire consultants. The column goes on to describe the results of a ten year study of consultants’ manager selection recommendations. The academic study found that the recommendations underperformed the market and were worse than the performance of the managers that were not recommended. This was also true in the selection of allocations to various sectors. However, the recommended managers’ performance hugged the benchmark better. (Perhaps the consultants recommended closet indexers.) I suspect the buyers of the consultants’ services expected those results. They knew the value of the John Maynard Keynes quote “Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” In another quote from Farnam Street discussing Howard Marks’ book, The Most Important Thing, “first-order thinkers look for things that are simple, easy, and defendable.” Howard makes the distinction between first-order and second-order thinkers. First-order thinkers are only interested in the current time period, whereas second-order thinkers are focused on how the present sets up a number of future scenarios.

Disguised Consultants
Many of today’s investment advisers were impacted by the changing economics in the financial community, from being a fixed fee adviser or a commission driven broker to becoming a registered investment adviser charging a management fee. Since many investment advisors have no rigorous training in securities analysis, they focus their client bets on sectors and factors, using statistical measures, current news, and trends. As with manger selection, consultants are often first-order thinkers and produce similarly unappealing results.  One tip off as to their performance is the weekly data from my old firm’s publication of the Lipper Performance Report. During the latest week, all twenty categories of US Diversified Equity funds showed positive results, comprising the management of $8 Trillion in aggregate. In contrast 18 out of the 28 sector equity funds showed losses, comprising only $1 Trillion in aggregate. The difference between the two is that the diversified funds owned some of the best stocks in the sector portfolios and had enough diversification to produce less volatile results.

Nervous Contrarian
With the consultant’s focus on short term results, echoed by a number of investment committees and other insecure fiduciaries, the ability to predict short term market moves is critical (This is not true for long term investors.) The current stock market is being driven much more by changes in sentiment than fundamentals. Most transactions are originating from non-price sensitive transactors and the markets are reacting to changes of sentiment driven by news, fake news, and rumors. To see the rapid changes of sentiment, look in Barron’s for the results of the weekly American Association of Individual Investors (AAII) sample poll shown below:

View Latest Week     2 Weeks Ago   3 Weeks Ago
Bullish                    34.7%                   43.1%                  27.9%
Bearish                   24.9                       29.2                     39.3
Neutral                   40.4                       27.8                     32.6

As a contrarian I get nervous if I find myself betting with the crowd. Thus, if neutral approaches 50% I will be forced to make a decision and not just bet against the bulls or bears. At the moment my short-term inclination is to go to the bearish side and maintain a bullish position for the long term.

Career Risks
The challenge for the professional investor is to play according to the consultants’ rules, or attempt to produce extraordinary performance by being different, which almost guarantees underperformance some of the time.

Is Cash an Asset Class?
Last week I attended a Pershing Conference for Investment Advisers. I was particularly impressed with a discussion that included Rob Sharps, who chairs the growth equity committee at T. Rowe Price and is an important input into their best in class target date funds. (I am biased in the favor of T. Rowe, having known each of their chairman back to Mr. Price himself. We are users of some of their funds both personally and for clients, and also hold a position in our private financial services fund. I took particular note when he said that at the margin they were de-risking for the first time this cycle. In addition, State Street is raising the question of cash, pointing out that the current rates of return on US Treasury Bills are closing in on the Fed’s targeted inflation rate.

Years ago I studied the performance of various mutual funds that raised cash defensively. In major declines only funds that had about 25% of their assets in cash like instruments had a meaningfully smaller decline in the market. The longer term problem with these funds is that do not recommit to the equity market fast enough, so that when the market regains its prior peak they underperform and are meaningfully worse as performers.

Avoiding Poor Recovery Syndrome
There are two ways to avoid the poor recovery syndrome. The first is not to raise a great deal of cash but instead move heavily into low risk stocks that pay good dividends and a have a shareholder base to support liquidity in the stock price. We used to call them warehouse stocks. The classic one was the old AT&T, not the current stock of the same name. The second approach is to replace the portfolio manager with the next generation, a generation not burdened by the knowledge of what won’t work because it didn’t in the past. In recoveries, the combination of new enthusiasm and momentum will be early stage winners. The trick is then to replace the successful youngster with a more rounded manager.

Bottom Line
Be prepared to move away from the crowd, examine defensive tactics, and don’t fall in love with cash.

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A. Michael Lipper, CFA
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Use Simple or Complex Mixes of Tactics and Strategies to Attain Investment Success.

Introduction

The global stock markets are probably not priced with a lot of bargains. High quality, fixed income markets are full of fears. All markets including commodities and real estate are likely to be more volatile for the next couple of years than what we have recently experienced. If you disagree leave the worrying to the rest of us.

Our concern is based on the volatility that won’t be constrained and lead to panic-driven major disruptions. Since we don’t know what our next investment voyages will be like, we should examine our navigational tools. In our lives we know from our own or observed experiences that frequent changes rarely produce optimum results and in many cases deplete resources substantially. Thus the key to using the appropriate tools is the discipline to use them correctly and even when periodically they produce sub-optimum near-term results. Nevertheless there may be times when changing tools makes sense. Usually the best time to make switches is whenever a tool is too successful and not when it is underperforming. This reliance on intelligent discipline is one of the may lessons that I learned in the US Marine Corps.

Our basic four investment philosophical tools are:

1.   Reliance on Simplistic Approaches

2.   Recognition of Complexity

3.   Goal focused Strategies

4.   Timely Tactical moves

Simple

A study of most very successful individual investors appears to demonstrate that large wealth is generated by investing in ownership of equity, usually very concentrated to the point of a single investment.  It takes an unusual person that can tolerate the cyclicality involved in a single or even a highly concentrated portfolio. This cyclicality produces too much trauma for most. So they start to diversify. The problem with diversifying is that almost every day a new potential threat to one’s wealth shows up, particularly in the media. The standard risk control measure for new risks is to add some new protective investment. Over time this approach leads to a large number of investments.

In the modern world, people and institutions seek comfort in becoming part of the masses and either directly or indirectly index their portfolios. The thinking behind this is that all of these investors can’t be wrong, but equally they can’t be as right as the successful wealth-builders. Other simple philosophies are to only invest in highly credit rated stocks and bonds which produce similar upside and downside results. It is like someone who goes to the racetrack to bet on winning horses, so they bet on almost every horse in the race. Quite often they will have a winning ticket, but most of the time the money received will not pay for all the losing tickets. The nice part of simple moves is that they do not require additional thinking or analyzing.

Recognizing Complexity

There are no two people exactly alike. Even my twin grandsons, not only are they different, but they strive to be different. While each market has on the surface similar characteristics of prior market cycles, there are enough differences so the past is a bit instructive but not totally predictive. I believe that each portfolio and investor are different than others. One of the risks that some investors face in dealing with live managers and brokers as well as the so-called robo advisors is that at times one’s needs and preferences are not utilized in portfolios. One of the ways I recommend dealing with this is to divide an investment portfolio in terms of expected payouts. I start often with four timespan portfolios.

Each portfolio can be selective in terms of levels of aggressiveness/conservative as well as many other selection functions. Because consultants want to deliver the past to clients, they ask about the dispersion of performance within a manager’s book of business. To the extent that there is little dispersion, there is little attention as to the differences between people and institutions. All 401(k), pension plans, endowments, and families are different and deserved to be  treated that way. However, there is an expense to managing complexity. The difference is similar to buying off the rack versus custom produced and fitted clothes. Each has its place, but overtime the old rule of getting what you pay for generally works.

Goal Focused Strategies

Almost every physical and investment trip has bends and turns with occasional reversals. Those who successfully complete their trip do so because they have a navigational tool of an effective compass. We all understand that prices go down as well as up. While there are relatively few complete wipeouts, we have seen 90% declines in leveraged, highly speculative stocks in the 1960s and the 1930s. These are rarities. Most general stock market declines in a single generation are on the 50% variety. Within each rolling ten year period there is a 25% fall, and often within a ten year period there are three years of greater than 10% decline. Strategies should recognize the downside potentials, but also be aware and positioned for the upside.

Since 1926 the general stock market has on an annual basis gained in the range of 9%. We have experienced gains of three or four times the average and have seen a number of concentrated funds with speculative holdings post annual gains of over 100%.

Some may feel that because the number of publicly traded stocks is down by a factor of 50%, the institutionalization of trading, and the growth of index funds that past upsides will be curtailed. I would argue eventually the reverse. Periods of extreme concentration as we have been in, lead to lack of focus on securities that are not part of the highly valued concentrated portfolios particularly in the market capitalization weighted indices.

A very important point in assessing long-term investing is the power of reinvesting cash distributions (interest, dividends, and capital distributions). The great Sidney Homer, the long term head of Salomon Brothers fixed income research pointed out that for the long term bond investor there are three returns of cash over the life of the bond:  (a) proceeds from maturities, (b) current interest coupon payments, (c) and interest on interest.

Most people don’t fully appreciate that the third element produces the most cash. For example a bond with a 4% coupon held for a twenty year maturity will receive 100% of its issue price, 80% of its issue price for twenty years in interest payments, and if they can reinvest the interest payments at the same 4% for the period they will receive 119% of the issue price. The message here is that by buying and holding solid bonds and reinvesting the income, the return to the investor is larger than most believe. The key is not spending the interest and reinvesting it at a similar rate as the initial issue. (If you sense a certain rhythm to this approach it is worth noting Mr. Homer’s parents were both professional classical musicians.)

The interest on interest example is actually more powerful in investing dividend stocks and funds. Today they are many solid equity companies who are yielding 2% to 3% that over the next twenty years are likely to raise their current dividends at least at the rate of inflation, if not higher. Many of these stocks’ twenty year dividends will be higher than a 4% coupon on a high quality bond. Both many dividend paying stocks and all mutual funds have reinvestment mechanisms, so the equity investor does not have to look for current income opportunities the way the bond investor does. I am biased, but I believe the reinvestment potential through good mutual funds is better than many individual stocks. The US and UK regulators do not value the reinvestment mechanism in their assessment of the value to investors. Dividend paying stocks and mutual funds could represent a significant part of endowments and individuals long term portfolio segments.

Timely Tactical Moves

The first thing is to determine is whether the investor has trading skills. Can they recognize the difference between intra day and daily volatility vs. a meaningful change in price trends? There are some that believe that they posses this skill and a few may. It is very definitely an art form that requires the right personality approaches with extreme discipline.

Others attempt to be anticipatory and get ahead of new trends. As someone that has been known to be premature, too soon is often equivalent of being wrong. At times one may have to concede that one is premature and reposition for closer to fruition trends.

Contrarians can identify where they think the crowd is wrong and take a contrary view. Most of the time these moves don’t have much price risk as the market doesn’t believe in them.

My Dilemma

My dilemma is to find the correct communications with potential clients as to which of these tools should be used with all or a portion of their accounts. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

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Copyright ©  2008 - 2017

A. Michael Lipper, CFA

All rights reserved

Contact author for limited redistribution permission.