Video – Michael Mauboussin, Read The Books Or Watch The Talks

 

Read More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places

 

 

Read Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition

Video – Michael Mauboussian On Forbes

Intelligent Investing with Steve Forbes presents Michael Mauboussin, chief investment strategist, Legg Mason Capital Management, author of Think Twice

Major take-aways from the interview:

• 9%, 7.5% and 5.5-6%; the rates of return, respectively, for the S&P500, mutual funds and mutual fund investors, on average– why the discrepancy?
• Mutual funds underperform the S&P500 on a total return basis due to fees; mutual fund investors underperform the funds mostly due to timing– most individuals buy when funds have done well, sell when they’ve done poorly, exposing themselves to underperformance and missing out on subsequent over-performance
• Curiously, institutional investors underperform as well; the culprit is overactivity– people believe “if you work hard, you’ll be rewarded”, so institutional investors try to “earn” their returns by moving money around constantly
• Increasingly, investment returns have to do with luck and not skill; all activities in life fall along a continuum between pure skill and no luck (running competition) to pure luck and no skill (the lottery); the “Paradox of Skill” states that the more skillful competitors are, the more uniform their results become and the more important luck is to explaining differences in results
• How to accurately judge a manager’s returns? Sample size is important: the more decisions the manager has to make over time, the shorter time horizon can be used to judge them; the fewer decisions they make over time, the longer the time horizon used to judge them
• Focus on process, not outcome; in investing– analytical process of ideas, behavioral/psychological process, and organizational process (constraints w/in the organization that impede performance)
• Investing boils down to two activities: handicapping (looking at market assumptions via price and then backing into the scenario that would have to occur for that price to be reasonable, and judging the probability of it occurring) and bet-sizing (waiting until you have a strong advantage and then betting big)
• Expectations-based investing process: back into the cash flow assumptions that justify current market price; financial/strategic analysis of the company and its industry to see if the company is likely to do better or worse than the market implies; then decide to buy, sell or do nothing– what’s built in? what’s likely to happen? then “over-under” rather than “I know precisely what those cash flows will be”
• Systems that are entirely skill-based don’t revert to the mean at all; aside from fatigue, running a race 5x will result in the same, highly-skilled winner each time
• The extent to which a system is not all-skill is the extent to which it can mean-revert, but the question is, what mean? A highly skilled person might come down off a peak but they will not revert to the mean of more normally skilled individuals, for instance (tall parents tend to have tall children, but they might not be as tall as the parents — mean reversion — but you also don’t expect them to go down to the height of the average population)
• Investing is not all-luck, but it is luck-leaning on the continuum; the best way to judge managers is by process, not performance
• “Buy cheap and hold”: consider the story of Bob Kirby and the “Coffee Can Approach” [PDF]
• What can older investors do in today’s interest rate environment? Follow Jim Grant’s advice, “Roll back the calendar 30 years”, ie, nothing, they’re screwed
• “Patience is the key” to great investment returns