Every bull market produces a small percentage of people that get rich quick. They pick that one stock that goes to the moon or hit a lucky streak that never seems to end. They’re celebrated. Stories are written as if to suggest, “If they can do, maybe you can do it too.” It feeds hope.

But their stories are rarely followed up on or when they are, never draw the same amount of attention. The encore falls short of the initial performance.

Fred Schwed Jr. once described this admiration. He’d seen it before with his father.

I have often heard people describe the financial shenanigans of Pop and other men like him. Inevitably they are lost in admiration for such derring-do. “A millionaire for a while!” they exclaim. “And then flat on the seat of his pants,” they continue with even more gusto. “And then the whole business all over again! And again. Wow!”

These admirers must feel that this method of handling one’s finances has something to recommend it. Perhaps they feel that this is living dangerously. (It is, at that; to appreciate just how dangerously you should be an intimate member of the hero’s family.)

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Quote for the Week

It seems to me that Wall Street analysts show an extraordinary combination of sophistication and naiveté in their attitude toward speculation. They recognize, and properly so, that speculation is an important part of their environment. We all know that if we follow the speculative crowd we are going to lose money in the long run. Yet, somehow or other, we find ourselves very often doing just that. It is extraordinary how frequently security analysts and the crowd are doing the same thing. In fact, I must say I can’t remember any case in which they weren’t.

It reminds me of the story you all know of the oil man who went to Heaven and asked St. Peter to let him in. St. Peter said, “Sorry, the oil men’s area here is all filled up, as you can see by looking through the gate.” The man said, “That’s too bad, but do you mind if I just say four words to them?” And St. Peter said, “Sure.” So the man shouts good and loud, “Oil discovered in hell!” Whereupon all the oil men begin trooping out of Heaven and making a beeline for the nether regions. Then St. Peter said, “That was an awfully good stunt. Now there’s plenty of room, come right in.” The oil man scratches his head and says, “I think I’ll go with the rest of the boys. There may be some truth in that rumor after all.”

I think that is the way we behave, very often, in the movements of the stock market. We know from experience that we are going to end up badly, but somehow “there may be some truth in the rumor,” so we go along with the boys. — Ben Graham (source)

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Quote for the Week

Warren Buffett refers to staying within your circle of competence. Social psychologists tell us, though, that we are prone to overconfidence when it comes to assessing our abilities, so even when we think we have an advantage, we may well be mistaken.

In markets, competitive advantages are three: informational, analytical, or behavioral. Informational advantage is when you know something material that someone else doesn’t. It is the easiest to exploit and the hardest to find…

Analytical advantages come from taking publicly available information and processing or weighting it differently from the others…

Behavioral advantages are the most interesting because they are the most durable. The field of behavioral finance is still in its infancy yet has already yielded results that can be incorporated profitably into a sound investment process. The best part is that such results are likely to be systematically exploitable and not able to be arbitraged away as they become more widely known. That is because they represent broad findings about how large groups of people are likely to behave under well-defined circumstances. Until large numbers of people are able to alter their psychology (don’t hold your breath), there is money to be made from prospect theory, support theory, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. — Bill Miller (source)

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In the summer of 1999, Warren Buffett stood in front of a group of business leaders to share his views on the “new economy.” He believed that the exceptional rate of return on the stock market at the time was unsustainable. His audience wasn’t impressed.

A year later the Dotcom Bubble burst and Buffett was proved right. His “outdated views” had substance. After all, he had history on his side. Anytime innovation created a booming new industry it was followed by a collapse.

I thought it would be instructive to go back and look at a couple of industries that transformed this country much earlier in this century: automobiles and aviation. Take automobiles first: I have here a page, out of 70 in total, of car and truck manufacturers that have operated in this country…

All told, there appear to have been at least 2,000 car makes, in an industry that had an incredible impact on people’s lives. If you had foreseen in the early days of cars how this industry would develop, you would have said, “Here is the road to riches.” So what did we progress to by the 1990s? After corporate carnage that never let up, we came down to three U.S. car companies — themselves no lollapaloozas for investors. So here is an industry that had an enormous impact on America — and also an enormous impact, though not the anticipated one, on investors.

Sometimes, incidentally, it’s much easier in these transforming events to figure out the losers. You could have grasped the importance of the auto when it came along but still found it hard to pick companies that would make money.

Buffett’s tale of the airplane industry was similar. The number of airplane companies ballooned to roughly 300 by 1939 before declining to a handful today. Picking the winners from the outset was practically impossible.

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Quote for the Week

People want to buy today what they should have bought 5 or 6 years ago; call it the 5 year psychological cycle.

Today people want commodities, emerging market, non U.S. assets, and small and mid-cap stocks. Those were all cheap 5 years ago and had you bought them then you would be sitting on enormous gains. But 5 or 6 years ago, everyone wanted tech and internet and telecom stocks, and venture capital and U.S. mega caps. The time to buy them was in 1994 or 1995, when they were cheap.

But in 1994 or 1995, people wanted banks and small and mid caps, which should have been bought in 1990, and well, you get the picture.

In general, you can get a good sense of what to buy now by looking to see what the worst performing assets or groups were over the past five or six years. That is long term for most people, and long enough to convince them that the malaise is permanent and to have migrated their money elsewhere, such as to whatever has done best in the past 5 or 6 years. — Bill Miller, 2006 (source)

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