Quote for the Week

The really hard part about investment policy is not figuring out the best feasible combination. While it takes some time and analytical discipline, this part of the problem-solving is far from advanced science.

The really hard part is managing ourselves: our expectations and our interim behavior. Walt Kelly’s Pogo puts it as “we have met the enemy and he is us.” Most investors are too optimistic about the long run and much too optimistic about how well they will do compared to the averages, so they set themselves up for disappointment.

Even worse, most investors do harm to their longer-term investment results by trying and trying again to do better: changing managers and changing asset mix at the wrong time and in the wrong way. — Charley Ellis (source)

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Had you bought the S&P 500 on January 1st of any year since 1922, 69.2% of the time you’d have more money one year later. Using the Dow produces the same results: 69.2%.

Both those stats ignore dividends, by the way, which would help improve those numbers.

The idea behind it should set aside the concern of buying at a market top, only to sit at a loss for any number of years. It happens. No amount of market timing will prevent it. And worrying about it, based on those odds, appears to be overrated.

It’s interesting that those numbers don’t change much if you look even further back in time. Which is exactly what Edgar Lawrence Smith did:

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Quote for the Week

I divide investors into two schools: The “I know” school and the “I don’t know” school. For my first 20 years in business in what I would call the institutional establishment, I ran into the “I know” school most of the time. These are people who will tell you exactly what is going to go on one, three, five, or 10 years from now in the economy, in the markets, in interest rates, which economies will do best, which industries, and which stocks. They tend to invest on the assumption that they are right. Then when they turn out to be wrong, they try to correct their mistakes and invest on the next set of scenarios rather than acknowledging that perhaps rightly there are limitations on their foreknowledge.

The “I know” school invests for one outcome, economy, market, interest rates, industry, and company. They concentrate their portfolios given that they know what the future holds. They lever heavily, and they target maximum price gains.

Most of the outstanding investors that I have known over the years belong to the “I don’t know” school with regard to the macro environment. They may know companies and securities better than anybody else in the world, but with regard to the macro they assume that they don’t know what the future holds. So they hedge against uncertainty. They diversify. They avoid or limit leverage, and they emphasize the avoidance of losses rather than – or I would say as least as important as – the acquisition of gains.

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Quote for the Week

Another very simple effect I very seldom see discussed either by investment managers or anybody else is the effect of taxes. If you’re going to buy something which compounds for 30 years at 15% per annum and you pay one 35% tax at the very end, the way that works out is that after taxes, you keep 13.3% per annum.

In contrast, if you bought the same investment, but had to pay taxes every year of 35% out of the 15% that you earned, then your return would be 15% minus 35% of 15% or only 9.75% per year compounded. So the difference there is over 3.5%. And what 3.5% does to the numbers over long holding periods like 30 years is truly eye-opening. If you sit back for long, long stretches in great companies, you can get a huge edge from nothing but the way that income taxes work.

Even with a 10% per annum investment, paying a 35% tax at the end gives you 8.3% after taxes as an annual compounded result after 30 years. In contrast, if you pay the 35% each year instead of at the end, your annual result goes down to 6.5%. So you add nearly 2% of after-tax return per annum if you only achieve an average return by historical standards from common stock investments in companies with tiny dividend payout ratios…

There are huge advantages for an individual to get into a position where you make a few great investments and just sit back and wait: You’re paying less to brokers. You’re listening to less nonsense. And if it works, the governmental tax system gives you an extra 1, 2 or 3 percentage points per annum compounded. — Charlie Munger (source)

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Casinos operate on the simple principle that gambling, over time, is a losing endeavor. They ensure it. Your loss is the casinos gain.

Why is that? They design the games to favor the house, not the player. Anyone can place a bet, beat the odds, and win. The casino expects to lose on some bets in the short term.

But over thousands of spins of the wheel or rolls of the dice, your bankroll gets ground down to nothing and the casino comes out ahead.

That fact doesn’t stop people from gambling though. Some combination of entertainment, ignorance, overconfidence, optimism, and dumb luck keep people gambling and casinos in business.

The same reasons explain why people speculate in markets. Unfortunately, the outcome is same. Which is why the analogy comparing investors to casinos is so apt:

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