Novel Investor

Compounding investing wisdom...

Australopithecus and The Money Game

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Markets are made of up of millions of people — emotional and biased — who do weirdly wild things for no apparent reason. And yet, somehow, the markets are rational?

Adam Smith (George Goodman) discredits the thought in an imaginative way in The Money Game. One of the running themes can be summed up by Australopithecus.

Australopithecus was the “missing link” in human evolution, an ape-human creature with a smaller-by-more-than-half sized brain.

Something with such a small brain can hardly be rational or logical. It must be driven by baser instincts. So Australopithecus represents the unknown and unmeasurable emotion of the crowd.

…the real test is how you behave when the crowd is roaring the other way. We know a little about some individual types, but the crowd, the elusive Australopithecus, is still largely an unknown, an exercise in mass psychology still not accomplished.

Smith’s subtle jab shouldn’t be lost either: evolution gave us bigger brains but kept the baser instincts. That interplay of the crowd and the constant pull on emotions is a feature of the Game. Continue Reading…

Happy Hour: Too Much Money Chasing Too Few Deals

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I guess it’s Howard Marks week (the earlier post this week was totally unintentional). The latest Marks Memo made an appearance two days ago. To top that, Marks appeared on the Tim Ferris podcast.

The timing of the two conveniently fits with his soon to be released book Mastering the Market Cycle, which comes out next week. My copy is pre-ordered, which I’ll report on once I finish it.

Reading through the memo, I didn’t see anything new that Marks hasn’t already said. Market valuation is still high but not excessively expensive, the cycle is long in the tooth, and memories of 2008 are fleeting. The talk today has less to do with the pain of the past, but how long will good times last. It’s not euphoria, but there is an aversion to safety. Continue Reading…

Howard Marks: The Human Side of Investing

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The human side of investing is easily overlooked because nobody goes in believing they’ll act like a basket case at any point in the process. Instead, the focus is finding on the right strategy or allocation or fund or stock. And it makes sense…then something wild happens because it always does.

In the latest edition of The Most Important Thing, Howard Marks points to four central themes in the book. The riskiest things were one but mastering behavior was the critical theme:

The ‘human side of investing’ is the critical side. It’s certainly an area in which superior investors must excel, since financial analysis won’t guarantee superior performance if your reactions to developments are skewed by psychology just like those of others.

In other words, the best strategy is made worse in the hands of a basket case. Successful investing involves managing yourself and your money. To that end, Marks made six comments on the importance of controlling emotion and ego. Continue Reading…

Happy Hour: Only for the Most Part

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Only for the most part is the often missing addendum to broad sweeping statements about investing. Things like “stocks outperform bonds” or “value beats growth” typically leave out the closing refrain…only for the most part.

It may not seem important but as Peter Bernstein points out: “If it were ‘always’ rather than ‘for the most part,’ there would be no uncertainty.”

As much as people crave certainty in investing they’ll never achieve always (they’ll never stop looking for it either). Despite that, market history is filled with brief periods where investors purported always was achieved.

That Bernstein quote is from a paper that began as a speech given in September 1999. For those not investing at the time, it was the beginning of the end of a wild ride.

Back then, risk got flipped on its head. The risk was missing out. Stocks — Dotcom stocks especially — achieved always…or so people thought. And anyone who disagreed was labeled an old, out of touch, idiot. Buying into stories of unlimited potential returns do that to people. Continue Reading…

Two Rules of The Money Game

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The Money Game is a book lauded by everyone and I finally made time to read it. It’s an interesting, sometimes sarcastic, take on the game of investing. And it is a game unlike any other.

Unlike most games, in this one, there are no clear-cut set of rules or a defined way to win. There are no innings or quarters or final whistle.

In fact, all the participants play the game differently and for different reasons. They make up their own set of rules and have a different definition of winning. And they often change the rules and the definition multiple times depending on how well they’re playing.

The most important thing to know about this game is to know thyself. And if you can do that, the second most important thing is that you can’t take the game personally. You have to separate yourself from the investments you own.

Without those two things, the rules and definition won’t matter because playing the game will be costly. There are other important things to know too, but those two stood out because I haven’t finished the book yet.

In this often quoted but rarely followed passage, Adam Smith (George Goodman) explains all of the above and why: Continue Reading…

Happy Hour: The Wrong Lessons of 2008

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Asset appreciation draws in people that really don’t know anything about the asset. And people start being interested in something because it’s going up, not because they understand it or anything else. The guy next door, who they know is dumber than they are, is getting rich and they aren’t. And their spouse is saying can’t you figure it out too…It is so contagious. — Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett said that in an interview published this week. He’s describing the primary driver behind the next crisis, whenever that is…and every crisis that came before it.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of Lehman’s collapse during the downward spiral of the Financial Crisis. There’s been a lot written about it this week. Some anger, understandably, still exists. The blame game is still being played a decade later. Alternative fixes are still being argued over.

Fear still lingers too.

In the same interview, Buffett said this about fear: Continue Reading…

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