JJ Abodeely, author of the Value Restoration Project blog, writes about a theme that deserves more attention– that experience isn’t always an advantage and may even be a disadvantage, particularly at times like today where there appears to be a paradigm shift underway:
Consider how many firms espouse the experience of their managers as a key selling trait. The idea that experience might actually be detrimental to returns is not one that the investment management industry is willing to promote. However, an intellectually honest assessment of the role of experience in driving investment decision-making and results is in the best interest of advisors, managers and clients alike.
Perhaps even more importantly, relying on experience often means relying on a cloudy, biased recollection where our “memory is not as much a factual recording of events as it is a perception of the physical and emotional experience,” as behavioral finance professor John Nofsinger teaches us. Focusing on exposure, on the other hand, frees us to think beyond what our experience allows for. Perhaps ironically, forsaking experience for exposure may allow for a greater respect for the rhythm of history with a more objective and long-term analysis.
In practical terms, most investors today are impaired by their experiences in the 1980s and 1990s. They lack a historical understanding of secular market cycles and valuation, the closest thing we have to a law of gravity in finance. Similarly, most economists, with their data-heavy analysis, lean almost exclusively on the post-war period when modeling how the economy should behave. Most economists, strategists, analysts and investors have not experienced debt-induced financial crises, de-leveraging global economies or the demographic headwinds we face today. Nor does anybody’s experience include the ways in which today’s world is unique from any other point in history and the ways in which tomorrow’s history is completely unwritten.
A House Rises 