The first quarter of 2023 shows how far markets can swing in such a short time. In fact, double-digit moves in a single month are common even for market indexes. But how you react to those moves matters.

Unexpected events in March are a perfect example. Concerns about the health of a bank had a cascading effect. News of depositor withdrawals at Silicon Valley Bank set off further withdrawals, and finally a rush for the exits. The bank failed because depositors panicked.

Of course, that news tanked the bank’s stock, set off rumors of other banks at risk, and the financial sector dropped 14% in two weeks and a 10% loss in March.

The episode is a lesson in itself. People make up markets. A shift in their emotions moves markets. The most important part of investing is keeping your cool when the markets get crazy because emotions often undermine long-term returns.

A note before getting to the 2023 numbers. The asset class, sector, international markets, and emerging market return quilts are up-to-date with the first quarter returns. Hit the links for each one. Continue Reading…

Quote for the Week

Hindsight occurs when a surprising event takes place and the surprise is very brief, replaced almost immediately by a need to make sense of it. The individual has learned something from the event. For example, if there were two football teams that you considered equally-matched, and one of them trumps the other 5-0, they are no longer equally strong in your mind. One of them is clearly better than the other. This makes sense of their victory. It also makes it virtually impossible for you to re-construct that, earlier, you thought they were equal.

Now, we think that the team that actually won “had to win.” Why did it have to win? Because it won. It won because it was stronger. How do we know it is stronger? Because it won. This is hindsight. It has a huge effect on our thinking, it has a huge effect on investing behaviour, and it has a very pernicious effect, in that it teaches us something quite wrong about the nature of reality…

So, the pernicious effect of hindsight is that we get the sense, after the fact, that an event was predictable, so we get the sense that the world is predictable. We think the world makes sense, and that exaggeration of the coherence, consistency and predictability of the world means that we deny the real uncertainty with which we are faced in existence. And this denial of uncertainty in turn produces irrational action. — Daniel Kahneman (source)

Continue Reading…

Quote for the Week

The necessity to distinguish between the short run and the long run is one of the most difficult tasks the businessman faces — and yet perhaps it is the most essential of his tasks. At the same time, however, how does one determine whether the events of the past few weeks or months are just random blips or early harbingers of a more fundamental shift in the long-run environment? If short-run decisions made without regard to the long run are the sure road to disaster, we must also never forget that the long run is nothing more than an extended series of shorter-run variations. — Peter Bernstein (source)

Continue Reading…

Quote for the Week

After the violence of a crisis has subsided, it becomes clear that it is not upon Capital, nor even upon legitimate commerce that the blow has fallen heaviest. As a rule. Panics do not destroy Capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works…

Broadly defined, then, Panic is the destruction, in the mind, of a bundle of beliefs. As a first result of that destruction, a mass of paper documents, the outward expressions of those beliefs from which they derived their circulating force, becomes a mere dead residuum, leaving a void which can only be filled by other agents possessing that vital grasp on belief which they have lost. And the void must be filled. The volume of transactions and engagements cannot immediately be reduced. But Panic, the most rigorous of realists, rejects the dead symbols of Credit, and exacts Capital in the mobile form of currency. Suum cuique is now the universal rule, and everybody reclaims his own. The usual magazines of Capital in that form are rapidly drained, and the rate of its hire is proportionately raised. The Panic period is therefore marked by great scarcity of mobile Capital; because, though not less in quantity than before, it is drafted off into a thousand unusual channels to perform the functions commonly exercised by Credit. — John Stuart Mill (source)

Continue Reading…