Risks and Avoidable Mistakes for 2015

Introduction

For most dollar oriented investors 2014 was an "okay" year with a third year in a row of double digit gains for the S&P 500, but not for the bulk of institutional accounts. Consciously or not, many investors and managers were aware of the length of the present bull market having entered its 61st month. This has created twin dilemmas for the prudent management of responsible money.

First dilemma - Large Cap over-ownership

As regular readers of these posts recognize and true to my analytical history, I tend to view investments through the lens of mutual funds. When simplifying the fund performance data for 2014 by size of market capitalizations the following is revealed:

Large Cap funds	11%
Multi-cap funds (Unrestricted/ or “go anywhere” funds	9%
Mid Cap funds	8%
Small Cap funds	3%

In a dynamic economy the rank order of operating earnings power generation would be in the opposite order, being led by Small Caps or possibly the successful "Go Anywhere" funds. Focusing on operational earnings, excluding foreign exchange benefits, I believe that the Large Caps were producing approximately 3 times the long-term growth of the Small Caps. The better market performance of the Large Caps, I believe, was a function of market structure changes. Some institutional investors being concerned with the duration  of this bull market moved heavily into Large Cap stocks directly or more importantly through the use of ETFs invested in the S&P 500 and other indices. Because of perceived greater liquidity in Large Caps they were hiding out in what we used to call warehouses. With governments all over the world looking to Large Caps being "social progress" engines, I have some doubts as to the growth prospects for Large Cap companies.

Second dilemma - Historical constraints

As is often the case, apparent boundaries come with both hard data and locked-in thought processes. The data is the easy part. While as noted we are in the sixty-first month of the recovery, of the nine last market recoveries, four have been over 100 days in length with the longest being 181 days. Thus for a manager a possible career risk is exiting too soon which puts a premium on investing in liquid positions. Because so many others have made similar judgments as to the better liquidity in Large Caps, if there is a sudden drop in the market, I believe the excessive amount invested in Large Caps will find their exit liquidity either expensive or non-existent for those that are late.

The biggest risk for investors and their managers are the biases that many of us labor with in making so-called rational decisions. The following are a list of these biases as listed by Essential Analytics:

List of biases

Outcome, herding, conviction (the curse of knowledge), recency, framing, band wagon effect, information, anchoring, optimism.

I suggest that many of these biases find their way into reports; supporting in effect, the reasons we all have made decisions that haven't worked out. The key for all of us is to understand our biases. Some biases we will be able to overcome. Others we will have to accept as immutable.

This suggests that when putting together a portfolio of funds or managers, it would be wise to try to diversify the various biases of the hired portfolio managers as well as our own as the owners or fiduciaries of the capital being deployed.

Overcoming biases

I have a definite advantage in this task by personality. By nature I am both curious of what I don't know and often a contrarian. As a contrarian again using the mutual fund microscope, the following may be useful thoughts:

Looking to extremes one might wish to set up a pair trade of being long some of the components in the S&P Latin American energy index which declined -39% vs. the average Indian fund which was up 41% in 2014. In a similar fashion one might start to research funds in the following groups that declined in 2014:

Energy Commodity funds	-34%
General Commodity funds	-16%
Global Natural Resources funds	-15%
Domestic Natural Resources funds	-15%
Dedicated Short-bias funds	-15%

I take some comfort in the contrarian thoughts contained in the headline to John Authers insightful Financial Times column: "The case for gently shifting money away from US." I believe a well-reasoned portfolio should be looking for opportunities on a global basis both in terms of what companies do and where various securities are traded.

Final thought

Many year-end predictions are essentially extrapolations of existing market trends and this could be what will happen. However, I am searching for the beginnings of new trends that will produce +20% or -20% in a twelve month period. I would appreciate hearing your thoughts as to when and which direction (or both) you expect price movement. I firmly believe we will once again experience this kind of action.

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Interaction of My Investment Muses

George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Ben Graham, Sir John Templeton, Warren Buffett, Jason Zweig

Introduction

Almost every year on the Saturday evening nearest to February 22nd my wife, Ruth and I attend the birthday dinner celebration for George Washington, the first and greatest US president.  At each George Washington's Birthday celebration The Mount Vernon Ladies Association^*  presents a thought-provoking after dinner speaker. This year's speaker was Walter Isaacson, the scholarly author and biographer of great Americans from Benjamin Franklin to Steve Jobs.  He is also the current president of the Aspen Institute, whose summer sessions I have attended.   His talk at Mt. Vernon focused on the comparison, contrast and coordination of George Washington and Ben Franklin.

*Ruth is a long time member of the Life Guards, a support group for Mount Vernon.

We all react to various inputs into our daily lives through many filters, but often through the singular vision which guides our intellectual actions. For my sins, I tend to think about my roles as a fiduciary investment advisor and investor in mutual funds and similar vehicles as well as an investor in selected financial services stocks.  My reactions to the Mt. Vernon dinner speech are within this context.

While Mr. Isaacson's talk was about these two great Americans' political evolution from different starting points, I could not avoid thinking about the inputs these two successful leaders and entrepreneurs would have on my portfolio management and investment challenges of today. Think about the character of George Washington, the military leader and major farm landowner, who was willing to face unknowns against long odds of success in his search for his own and his country's growth. In contrast was Ben Franklin the poor boy who looked for inexpensive strategic investment at bargain prices. While Dr. Franklin's successful commercial ventures focused on his editorial and business skills as a publisher, too little attention is paid to his initiation of a colonial postal system where mail could go from Massachusetts to Virginia directly rather than being routed first through London. In effect this postal system became the glue that allowed the separate and fractious colonies to begin to evolve into a somewhat unified country.

Washington: growth, Franklin: value

Intellectually through my narrow eyes I perceive George Washington as our first growth focused investor leader and Ben Franklin as our first innovative value seeker. These were the progenitors in the more modern world of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger as future focused "growth" investors (both of whom I am looking forward to hearing at their Berkshire Hathaway^** annual meeting this year)  and Ben Graham and Sir John Templeton as valued-focused investors.

** Securities that I either own or are in the financial services fund that I manage or both.

Picking winners

Long time readers of these posts and my book Money Wise have learned that I was first educated about security analysis by handicapping (analyzing) at the race track. The key to regularly coming away from the track as a winner was first to avoid losers by not having a betting interest in every race and being highly selective in betting on the difference between the probabilities and the odds dictated by the weight of other people's money. I try to apply the same general approaches to selecting funds for portfolios of funds and individual investment management stocks. These processes are very different than reading the standard Request For Proposal (RFP) that is a highly quantitatively driven search filter for institutional management mandates. These documents’ authors believe that they are dealing with commoditized skill sets that can easily be selected quantitatively. Going back to my racetrack education I recognize that this approach leads to backing favorites. A study of past betting results (past performance) reveals that favorites win a minority of the time and when they do the returns are low and usually can not meaningfully offset the losses when the favorites don't win.

To me successful selection is much more an art form than a science. The art form has to do with understanding the way particular people work successfully in competition and combination with other skilled players. Thus to me the key skills of selection are more akin to the brilliant curators of museums than mathematical screeners. The great curators mix some of the talents of George Washington and Warren Buffett looking for growth beyond the present and the two Bens (Franklin and Graham) innovative bargain purchasers.

Understanding the development process

In general, most equity portfolio managers start as security analysts, as I did. Many fixed income managers start off on a trading desk. Why is it that there are considerably more analysts and traders than institutional portfolio managers? Is it the normal pyramid of responsibilities and related compensation within institutional management organizations? Yes, that is one factor, but not the only one. Good analysts and traders, those with winning records of selections are absorbed in their focus on essential details of particular investments in the current time frame. But this kind of highly competitive knowledge is not enough to make good  portfolio managers. The big hurdle that these bright people need to get over is similar to the selectors using RFPs to pick managers. A collection of securities having very similar characteristics is like a symphony orchestra that can all hit the equivalent of high Cs, or a museum that shows only all the artwork of an artist produced in a single year of his or her development. The risk in such a collection is the likely homogeneity of results when impacted by the unknowns that occur.

George Washington thrived on dealing with the unknowns that others did not perceive. A sound portfolio can survive and prosper often under a number of different conditions including the unexpected. This requires moving away from the comfort zone of intense knowledge into the spheres of the less known. Many analysts and traders can't comfortably make the jump. Just combining securities of different natures is not good enough, portfolio managers need to have an effective knowledge of  trading desks. They need to understand what kind of trading orders their traders can execute well, including the difficult trades. Often the trading desk is the first source of the recognition that something is happening in a particular security, sector, or market. I view traders as an important source of market intelligence. Apparently false rumors which could be true are often as important to the future as facts that turn out to be true.

Additional concerns of portfolio managers

A working knowledge of compliance is a necessary set of skills for today’s portfolio manager. Many smart and essentially honest analysts, traders and portfolio managers stray over the somewhat indistinct lines of their actions. Often in their mind obligations to clients lead them to inadvertently breech a compliance barrier which can prove to be expensive for all concerned. Another skill in the real world is to manage the portfolio to fulfill its marketing position. This is what the customer expects. Often part of the commercial responsibilities of a successful portfolio manager is to become a spokesperson for the particular product or the firm.  Some senior portfolio managers move up their corporate ladders and become a managing executive with responsibility for managing people, including difficult people like themselves. Most are unprepared for this by their formal education or by the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) readings and exams. Every now and then former analysts that I have known move up through their organizations and become CEOs of their firms, including some which are publicly traded. As one moves up in this world the track record becomes muddied by other people's actions and so selection of which firm to invest with does not lend itself to statistical sorting.

Selection by DNA

My friend Jason Zweig has a thought-provoking piece in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, questioning how DNA or more accurately, the critical life experiences of our parents, shape our investment thinking. He points out that Ben Graham’s mother was "wiped out" by unwise speculation in 1907, and a somewhat similar experience by John Templeton's father shaped both of their investment practices. Graham and Templeton first looked at the downsides and then for bargains. Sir John carried his management process by wide diversification across national borders.

What did I learn about myself from this article? I am driven to attempt to protect my family, including future generations, from an historical pattern where eventually the spenders in the family overcome the earners and investments suffer. I am not just thinking in terms of securities investments, but also life investments of time, money, and a lot of effort into life activities that are neither personally rewarding nor benefit a larger group. This has lead me into attempting to set up some controls to protect members of my family from wasting their opportunities.  

Please share with me confidentially what investment DNA you think is driving your current investments.

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Copyright © 2008 - 2014

A. Michael Lipper, C.F.A.,
All Rights Reserved.
Contact author for limited redistribution permission.