Portfolio Investors Quotes

When money is pooled together, it has a greater impact. A million dollars has more impact than one hundred thousand dollars. One hundred ETH has more impact than ten ETH. The more money, the greater the impact.

It’s not possible for investors to consistently outperform the market. Therefore you’re best served investing in a diversified portfolio of low-cost index funds [or exchange-traded funds].

Ultimately, incentive structures and systems drive ESG investing, which can be disingenuous. Structurally, public market investors continue to focus on the incentives which maximize their financial returns, even while taking certain ESG inputs into account in their portfolio allocations. Only by regulating and incentivizing the actual outcomes might investors alter their investment strategies towards new rewards based on ESG outputs.

As we said, even the best venture investors have a portfolio, but investors who understand the power law make as few investments as possible.

Many investors have a homogeneous view of portfolio diversification. They’re thinking about large cap vs small cap vs equity vs bonds. And that’s important, but nature views diversification much more holistically. And at Mayflower-Plymouth, so do we.

Capital must be consistently accumulated and compounded - that's the expectation.

All stakeholders should benefit from the capital we allocate in our portfolio.

Being net value adders puts us better positioned for long-term growth and longevity – because in the long term, capital flows to net value adders.

investors who pay attention to the economy can be more successful because they can take advantage of impending changes. While everyone else is focused on what’s happening right now, economically savvy investors can focus on what’s coming

Most people strive to adjust their portfolios based on what they think lies ahead. At the same time, however, most people would admit forward visibility just isn't that great. That's why I make the case for responding to the current realities and their implications, as opposed to expecting the future to be made clear.

students need only two well-taught courses—How to Value a Business, and How to Think About Market Prices. Your goal as an investor should simply be to purchase, at a rational price, a part interest in an easily-understandable business whose earnings are virtually certain to be materially higher five, ten and twenty years from now. Over time, you will find only a few companies that meet these standards—so when you see one that qualifies, you should buy a meaningful amount of stock. You must also resist the temptation to stray from your guidelines: If you aren’t willing to own a stock for ten years, don’t even think about owning it for ten minutes. Put together a portfolio of companies whose aggregate earnings march upward over the years, and so also will the portfolio’s market value. Though it’s seldom recognized, this is the exact approach

The most realistic distinction between the investor and the speculator is found in their attitude toward stock-market movements. The speculator’s primary interest lies in anticipating and profiting from market fluctuations. The investor’s primary interest lies in acquiring and holding suitable securities at suitable prices. Market movements are important to him in a practical sense, because they alternately create low price levels at which he would be wise to buy and high price levels at which he certainly should refrain from buying and probably would be wise to sell. It is far from certain that the typical investor should regularly hold off buying until low market levels appear, because this may involve a long wait, very likely the loss of income, and the possible missing of investment opportunities. On the whole it may be better for the investor to do his stock buying whenever he has money to put in stocks, except when the general market level is much higher than can be justified by well-established standards of value. If he wants to be shrewd he can look for the ever-present bargain opportunities in individual securities. Aside from forecasting the movements of the general market, much effort and ability are directed on Wall Street toward selecting stocks or industrial groups that in matter of price will “do better” than the rest over a fairly short period in the future. Logical as this endeavor may seem, we do not believe it is suited to the needs or temperament of the true investor—particularly since he would be competing with a large number of stock-market traders and first-class financial analysts who are trying to do the same thing. As in all other activities that emphasize price movements first and underlying values second, the work of many intelligent minds constantly engaged in this field tends to be self-neutralizing and self-defeating over the years. The investor with a portfolio of sound stocks should expect their prices to fluctuate and should neither be concerned by sizable declines nor become excited by sizable advances. He should always remember that market quotations are there for his convenience, either to be taken advantage of or to be ignored. He should never buy a stock because it has gone up or sell one because it has gone down. He would not be far wrong if this motto read more simply: “Never buy a stock immediately after a substantial rise or sell one immediately after a substantial drop.” An

Investors place bets in a portfolio of companies, but I only have one life

Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.

Personal finance, like most important aspects of life, is a never-ending quest. The competent investor never stops learning.

Many new investors, eager to see quick profits, need to develop the patience and research skills necessary for successful long-term investing.

Supremely rational investors take the further step of acting against consensus, rebalancing to long-term portfolio targets by buying the out-of-favor and selling the in-vogue.

The idea that a few things account for most results is not just true for companies in your investment portfolio. It’s also an important part of your own behavior as an investor.

ONE KEY TO BUILDING A SUCCESSFUL INVESTMENT portfolio is to eliminate the risk you can control and reduce the risk you can’t.   One

Money managers tend to make irrational decisions just to protect their calendar year performances, even if they believe that decision is not in the best interest of investors.

Annual performance means nothing to individual investors.

The index fund is a most unlikely hero for the typical investor. It is no more (nor less) than a broadly diversified portfolio, typically run at rock-bottom costs, without the putative benefit of a brilliant, resourceful, and highly skilled portfolio manager. The index fund simply buys and holds the securities in a particular index, in proportion to their weight in the index. The concept is simplicity writ large.

This tendency of overconfidence and poor outcomes is not confined to only retail investors. Institutional investors suffer from overconfidence equally if not more, and their investment results are not superior either.

Proper diversification means investing in uncorrelated assets, and investing in multiple assets needs multiple sets of knowledge, more hours of research, and more market following. It is definitely more work for an investor.

Investment Owner’s Contract I, _____________ ___________________, hereby state that I am an investor who is seeking to accumulate wealth for many years into the future. I know that there will be many times when I will be tempted to invest in stocks or bonds because they have gone (or “are going”) up in price, and other times when I will be tempted to sell my investments because they have gone (or “are going”) down. I hereby declare my refusal to let a herd of strangers make my financial decisions for me. I further make a solemn commitment never to invest because the stock market has gone up, and never to sell because it has gone down. Instead, I will invest $______.00 per month, every month, through an automatic investment plan or “dollar-cost averaging program,” into the following mutual fund(s) or diversified portfolio(s): _________________________________, _________________________________, _________________________________. I will also invest additional amounts whenever I can afford to spare the cash (and can afford to lose it in the short run). I hereby declare that I will hold each of these investments continually through at least the following date (which must be a minimum of 10 years after the date of this contact): _________________ _____, 20__. The only exceptions allowed under the terms of this contract are a sudden, pressing need for cash, like a health-care emergency or the loss of my job, or a planned expenditure like a housing down payment or a tuition bill. I am, by signing below, stating my intention not only to abide by the terms of this contract, but to re-read this document whenever I am tempted to sell any of my investments. This contract is valid only when signed by at least one witness, and must be kept in a safe place that is easily accessible for future reference.

Speaking of leaving well enough alone, I find it interesting that less than 10 percent of the millionaires of this country consider themselves “active” traders, and 42 percent of the millionaires of this country make less than one transaction per year in their investment portfolios.1

little known and not fully understood; fundamentally questionable on the surface; controversial, unseemly or scary; deemed inappropriate for “respectable” portfolios; unappreciated, unpopular and unloved; trailing a record of poor returns; and recently the subject of disinvestment, not accumulation.

Men are hard-wired for risk taking—particularly young men. The number one killer of fifteen- to twenty-four-year-old males is accidents.6 Female investors hold less risky investment portfolios than their male counterparts and generally take fewer chances with their money. Churches need men because men are natural risk takers—and they bring that orientation into the church. Congregations that do not take risks atrophy. Jesus made it clear that risk taking is necessary to please God. In the parable of the talents, the master praises two servants who risked their assets and produced more, but he curses the servant who played it safe. He who avoids all risk is, in the words of Jesus, “wicked and lazy".

Social validation, sometimes referred to as herding, is a powerful, hardwired behavior. It is observed in nearly all species, including geese, deer, fish, and insects. Herding is frequently critical for survival, so to go contrary to it is incredibly difficult. The lesson of our past is that sticking out from the crowd by doing something different is dangerous.

most important distinction in the investment world does not separate individuals and institutions; the most important distinction divides those investors with the ability to make high quality active management decisions from those investors without active management expertise. Few institutions and even fewer individuals exhibit the ability and commit the resources to produce risk-adjusted excess returns.

Ever since the 2008 global financial crisis, central banks had ventured, not by choice but by necessity, ever deeper into the unfamiliar and tricky terrain of “unconventional monetary policies.” They floored interest rates, heavily intervened in the functioning of markets, and pursued large-scale programs that outcompeted one another in purchasing securities in the marketplace; to top it all off, they aggressively sought to manipulate investor expectations and portfolio decisions.

The strategy we’ve adopted precludes our following standard diversification dogma. Many pundits would therefore say the strategy must be riskier than that employed by more conventional investors. We disagree. We believe that a policy of portfolio concentration may well decrease risk if it raises, as it should, both the intensity with which an investor thinks about a business and the comfort-level he must feel with its economic characteristics before buying into it. In stating this opinion, we define risk, using dictionary terms, as “the possibility of loss or injury.” —Warren Buffett, 19931

To be sure, the cost of managing capital and of “formal” financial intermediation (that is, the investment advice and portfolio management services provided by a bank or official financial institution or real estate agency or managing partner) is obviously taken into account and deducted from the income on capital in calculating the average rate of return (as presented here). But this is not the case with “informal” financial intermediation: every investor spends time—in some cases a lot of time—managing his own portfolio and affairs and determining which investments are likely to be the most profitable. This effort can in certain cases be compared to genuine entrepreneurial labor or to a form of business activity.

The real nemesis of the modern economy is ecological collapse. Both scientific progress and economic growth take place within a brittle biosphere, and as they gather steam, so the shock waves destabilise the ecology. In order to provide every person in the world with the same standard of living as affluent Americans, we would need a few more planets – but we only have this one. If progress and growth do end up destroying the ecosystem, the cost will be dear not merely to vampires, foxes and rabbits, but also to Sapiens. An ecological meltdown will cause economic ruin, political turmoil, a fall in human standards of living, and it might threaten the very existence of human civilisation. We could lessen the danger by slowing down the pace of progress and growth. If this year investors expect to get a 6 per cent return on their portfolios, in ten years they will be satisfied with a 3 per cent return, in twenty years only 1 per cent, and in thirty years the economy will stop growing and we’ll be happy with what we’ve already got. Yet the creed of growth firmly objects to such a heretical idea. Instead, it suggests we should run even faster. If our discoveries destabilise the ecosystem and threaten humanity, then we should discover something to protect ourselves. If the ozone layer dwindles and exposes us to skin cancer, we should invent better sunscreen and better cancer treatments, thereby also promoting the growth of new sunscreen factories and cancer centres. If all the new industries pollute the atmosphere and the oceans, causing global warming and mass extinctions, then we should build for ourselves virtual worlds and hi-tech sanctuaries that will provide us with all the good things in life even if the planet is as hot, dreary and polluted as hell.

The combination of loss aversion and narrow framing is a costly curse. Individual investors can avoid that curse, achieving the emotional benefits of broad framing while also saving time and agony, by reducing the frequency with which they check how well their investments are doing. Closely following daily fluctuations is a losing proposition, because the pain of the frequent small losses exceeds the pleasure of the equally frequent small gains. Once a quarter is enough, and may be more than enough for individual investors. In addition to improving the emotional quality of life, the deliberate avoidance of exposure to short-term outcomes improves the quality of both decisions and outcomes. The typical short-term reaction to bad news is increased loss aversion. Investors who get aggregated feedback receive such news much less often and are likely to be less risk averse and to end up richer. You are also less prone to useless churning of your portfolio if you don’t know how every stock in it is doing every day (or every week or even every month). A commitment not to change one’s position for several periods (the equivalent of “locking in” an investment) improves financial performance.

Investment In Real Estate Is A Worthwhile Endeavor Several factors has to be studied by any individual who is planning an investment in real estate. For example, if business properties are desired, the client should are aware of they may be targeting certain conditions that aren't typically seen with residential properties. Nonetheless, for the appropriate particular person, and for those who plan fastidiously and receive good recommendation, this feature investment will be highly profitable. Individuals looking for commercial properties can certainly find that there are numerous kinds of institutions by which to come up with selection. For instance, an individual should purchase a restaurant or lodge, or invest in a retail store. The consumer may also select to buy an investment property comparable to your rent amount advanced and make an income from leaseing every unit. Office constructings can also be a smart selection, as tenants will likely be seen reasonably ardmore three wheelock quickly. It's fundamental, nevertheless, to buy such properties in nearly anything that receives beneficiant traffic. Most commercial institutions fail if they can't appeal to a steady transfer of customers. Buying residential property is something customers may additionally wish to think about that these planning to decide on their investment portfolios. For instance, an individual may decide to obtain a dwelling that have been renovated. Sometimes called "handyman specials, " such properties will be repaired which can offered during profit. Fortuitously, usually they are cheaper than properties that are in good repair. It is also a possibility to build an ad or residential property can be an investment. Builders who've satisfactory money to finance exceptionally challenge made having a tract of land and fill homes for it on the market to the general public. However, as soon as again, it is essential to pick a location carefully, as it may possibly nominal good to supply homes for sale in a part of the country in which nobody wants to live. Purchasing the primary property one finds is rarely a clever program of action. Instead, it is always the most effective interest match investor to comparability store attempting to discover at a couple of home or business earlier than making a final decision. It will make sure that the excellent ill use made. It can be more suitable obtain authorized advice every time one is planning to purchase various types property. This is even if that the buyer must have assurance that the property just isn't encumbered, and he or she can even want knowledgeable to make all the paperwork regarding the transaction is legal. Finally, individuals planning an investment in real estate will find that it plan of action is sensible, supplied they plan with care and hire a reliable broker to supervise their transactions.

Ben Graham–style bargain equities, we may become quite uncomfortable at times, especially if the market value of the portfolio declined precipitously. We might look at the portfolio and conclude that every investment could be worth zero. After all, we may have a mediocre business run by mediocre management, with assets that could be squandered. Investing in deep value equities therefore requires faith in the law of large numbers—that historical experience of market-beating returns in deep value stocks and the fact that we own a diversified portfolio will combine to yield a satisfactory result over time. This conceptually sound view becomes seriously challenged in times of distress. By contrast, an investor in high-quality businesses that are conservatively financed and run by shareholder-friendly managements may fall back on the well-founded belief that no matter how low the stock prices of those companies fall, the businesses will survive the downturn and recover value over time.

Alexis Tsipras, the Syriza leader, has in recent weeks abandoned his pledge to “tear up” the country’s bailout agreement with international creditors and is emphasising more moderate steps to address Greece’s debt load as well as his deep commitment to the euro. Krishna Guha, of Evercore ISI, warned that — at a minimum — investors now faced “a four-week period of elevated uncertainty in which eurozone risk assets will struggle to perform”. Yet Mr Guha added: “We believe that Tsipras will prove more pragmatic than past Syriza rhetoric suggests. He has opened back channels to Berlin, Paris and Frankfurt, and has every incentive to try to negotiate relatively cosmetic changes to Greece’s programme and ride the early-stage Greek recovery rather than derail it.” Nick Wall, a portfolio manager at Invesco, also noted Mr Tsipras’ recent attempt to tack to the political centre. “They are going to need private sector investors, particularly if they are going to start running deficits again.

By relying on the decisions of others to drive portfolio choices, investors fail to take responsibility for the most fundamental fiduciary responsibility—designing a portfolio to meet institution-specific goals.

To calculate these, they should determine the underlying earnings attributable to the shares they hold in their portfolio and total these. The goal of each investor should be to create a portfolio (in effect, a “company”) that will deliver him or her the highest possible look-through earnings a decade or so from now.

In the end it’s the tax-deferred 1031 exchange that gets massive use by Millionaire Real Estate Investors. This program in the IRS tax code allows you to sell and buy properties without having to declare capital gains or pay those taxes. It’s a very straightforward procedure, but it takes some planning. First, you need to hire a 1031 Qualified Intermediary before you close on the sale of one of your properties. That person will act as your guide and escrow agent as you move through the sale of one property and the purchase of the next. After the sale of your “relinquished property” you have 45 days to identify the “replacement property” and a total of 180 days to close on that second property. You want to be looking for the replacement property before or during the marketing of the property you are selling. If you find a good opportunity, you can enter into a contract with a right to assign clause if your first property does not sell or with a 1031 clause in the purchase agreement if it does. Many people have the mistaken notion that you are exchanging your property with someone else: You take theirs, and they take yours. In some cases that can be done, but it is neither the purpose nor the requirement of a 1031 exchange. A 1031 exchange is designed for you to “exchange” one property in your portfolio (sell it) and replace it with another one that you wish to buy. It allows you to keep purchasing larger, more expensive properties without having to pay capital gains taxes on the ones you sell. This is a wonderful way to keep your money working for you.

Jill buys an index mutual fund that tracks the overall stock market, never touching her money and earning the same return as the overall stock market. Average Joe "tinkers" with his portfolio, purchasing some mutual funds through his financial advisor and investing in stocks whenever he gets a particularly juicy tip from his neighbor. Joe earns the same return as the average investor in the stock market.

He focuses then, then, only on the odds for a crash-sharp, catastrophic price drops. After all, it is not small declines that wipe an investor out, it is the crashes. So their scaling formula minimizes the odds of too many of the assets in a portfolio crashing at the same time. They used that to draw a "generalized efficiency frontier"-analogous to Markowitz's original portfolio technique-to help pick a portfolio that maximizes returns for a given amount of crash-protection. As the paper put it, "the frequency of very large, unpleasant losses is minimized for a certain level of return." Thus, it is not just the stock-picking that is important, but also the risk-protection. For the latter, Bouchaud says, multifractal thinking is most useful.

It is interesting that an investor who has some knowledge of the principles of equity valuations often performs worse than someone with no knowledge who decides to index his portfolio.

Investors can take advantage of this mispricing by buying low-cost passively managed portfolios of value stocks or fundamentally weighted indexes that weight each stock by its share of dividends or earnings rather than by its market value.

Standard & Poor’s Dow Jones Indices published a statistical analysis in 2016 detailing the dismal record of “active” portfolio managers: As is typically the case, about two-thirds of active large-capitalization managers underperformed the S&P 500 large-cap index during 2015. Nor

And if you don’t believe me or even Charley, remember that Warren Buffett, perhaps the greatest investor of our time, has opined that all investors would be better off if their portfolio contained a diversified group of index funds.

Investment success requires the conviction that comes from a fundamental understanding of the rationale for building the portfolio to certain specifications. Unless investors truly believe in the efficacy and validity of an unconventional approach to asset management, the end result almost certainly fails to withstand the wear and tear of market forces. Thoughtless,

Casual commitments invite casual reversal, exposing portfolio managers to the damaging whipsaw of buying high and selling low. Only with the confidence created by a strong decision-making process can investors sell mania-induced excess and buy despair-driven value.

Mutual Fund Investments are not transparent: In India, SEBI regulates MFs. The money market MFs are regulated by RBI. There are restrictions as to the sponsor, board of trustees, asset management company, custodian, registrar, dealing with brokers, etc. The investment objective, fund manager, entry and exit loads, AUM, expense ratio and other terms and conditions are already known and provided in the SAI. Also, every MF scheme is required to publish a fact sheet on a quarterly/monthly basis that includes all the important facts that an investor would need to know about the scheme including portfolio holdings, past returns, performance ratios and dividends. Also, information relating to what’s in (bought) and what’s out (sold) by mutual funds is also available.

am managing my own portfolio of investments, as well as consulting with other independent investment managers.

In the great majority of cases the lack of performance exceeding or even matching an unmanaged index in no way reflects lack of either intellectual capacity or integrity. I think it is much more the product of: (1) group decisions—my perhaps jaundiced view is that it is close to impossible for outstanding investment management to come from a group of any size with all parties really participating in decisions; (2) a desire to conform to the policies and (to an extent) the portfolios of other large well-regarded organizations; (3) an institutional framework whereby average is “safe” and the personal rewards for independent action are in no way commensurate with the general risk attached to such action; (4) an adherence to certain diversification practices which are irrational; and finally and importantly, (5) inertia.6 Classical

Unlike common stocks, whose dividends and earnings fluctuate with the ups and downs of the company’s business, bonds pay a fixed dollar amount of interest. If the U.S. Treasury offers a $1,000 20-year, 5 percent bond, that bond will pay $50 per year until it matures, when the principal will be repaid. Corporate bonds are less safe, but widely diversified bond portfolios have provided reasonably stable interest returns over time.

The right response to a fall in the price of one asset class is never to panic and sell out. Rather, you need the long-term discipline and personal fortitude to buy more. Remember: The lower stock prices go, the better the bargains if you are truly a long-term investor. Sharp market declines may make rebalancing appear a frustrating “way to lose even more money.” But in the long run, investors who rebalance their portfolios in a disciplined way are well rewarded.

Similarly, the buy-and-hold investor who prudently holds a diversified portfolio of low-cost index funds through thick and thin is the investor most likely to achieve her long-term investment goals.

One asset class that belongs in most portfolios is bonds. Bonds are basically IOUs issued by corporations and government units. (The government units might be foreign, state and local, or government-sponsored enterprises such as the Federal National Mortgage Association, popularly known as Fannie Mae.) And just as you should diversify by holding a broadly diversified stock fund, so should you hold a broadly diversified bond fund.

High-quality bonds can moderate the risk of a common stock portfolio by providing offsetting variations to the inevitable ups and downs of the stock market. For

What does diversification mean in practice? It means that when you invest in the stock market, you want a broadly diversified portfolio holding hundreds of stocks. For people of modest means, and even quite wealthy people, the way to accomplish that is to buy one or more low-cost equity index mutual funds. The fund pools the money from thousands of investors and buys a portfolio of hundreds of individual common stocks. The mutual fund collects all the dividends, does all the accounting, and lets mutual fund owners reinvest all cash distributions in more shares of the fund if they so wish.

You can reduce risk by building up your investments slowly with regular, periodic investments over time. Investing regular amounts monthly or quarterly will ensure that you put some of your money to work during favorable periods, when prices are relatively low. Investment advisers call this technique “dollar-cost averaging.” With equal dollar investments over time, the investor buys fewer shares when prices are high and more shares when prices are low. It won’t eliminate risk but it will ensure that you don’t buy your entire portfolio at temporarily inflated prices. The

Rebalancing will not always increase returns. But it will always reduce the riskiness of the portfolio and it will always ensure that your actual allocation stays consistent with the right allocation for your needs and temperament.

A dearth of fiduciaries willing to place client interests foremost forces individuals to take responsibility for their investment portfolios. In the profit-motivated world of Wall Street, fiduciary responsibility takes a backseat to self-interest. What benefits the stockbroker (commissions), the mutual fund manager (large pools of assets), and the financial advisor (high fees) injures the investor. When profit motive meets fiduciary responsibility, profits win and investors lose. Understand

While investors have been well rewarded for taking the risks of investing in stocks in general, and specifically small stocks and value stocks, as well as for taking term risk [in bonds], they have received almost no reward for accepting corporate credit risks [in bonds].[40]

Almost all investors I know, who consider themselves proper investors according to the definition above, like to do the occasional trade, punt on pure speculation. But they do it with money they consider part of their  gambling portfolio, or play money. They would never risk their financial well being by mindlessly gambling with their main wealth.   What

These investment assets can be businesses, real estate portfolios, and even other investment managers who are capable of compounding money at very high returns consistently after all fees charged.   Bad

So the twentieth century has seen three severe drops in stock prices, one of them catastrophic. The message to the average investor is brutally clear: expect at least one, and perhaps two, very severe bear markets during your investing career. Long-term

Looked at from another perspective, in the 30 years from 1952 to 1981, stocks returned 9.9% and bonds returned only 2.3%, while inflation annualized out at 4.3%. Thus, during this period, the bond investor lost 2% of real value on an annualized basis, while the stock investor made a 5.6% real annualized return. The last fifteen years of that period were years of high inflation, so this is just another way of saying that stocks withstand inflation better than bonds. Short-term

During bull markets, everyone believes that he is committed to stocks for the long term. Unfortunately, history also tells us that during bear markets, you can hardly give stocks away. Most investors are simply not capable of withstanding the vicissitudes of an all-stock investment strategy. The

Now we arrive at one of the most counterintuitive points in all of finance. It is so counterintuitive, in fact, that even professional investors have trouble understanding it. To wit: Since Kmart is a much riskier company than Wal-Mart, investors expect a higher return from Kmart than they do from Wal-Mart. Think about it. If Kmart had the same expected return as Wal-Mart, no one would buy it! So its price must fall to the point where its expected return exceeds Wal-Mart’s by a wide enough margin so that investors finally are induced to buy its shares. The key word here is expected, as opposed to guaranteed. Kmart has a higher expected return than Wal-Mart, but this is because there is great risk that this may not happen.

The risk of owning stock in a single shaky company is very high. But in a portfolio of many such losers, a few might reasonably be expected to pull through, providing the investor with a reasonable return. Thus,

The first concerns how an investor should choose among different types of broad-based index funds. The best-known of the broad stock market mutual funds and ETFs in the United States track the S&P 500 index of the largest stocks. We prefer using a broader index that includes more smaller-company stocks, such as the Russell 3000 index or the Dow-Wilshire 5000 index. Funds that track these broader indexes are often referred to as “total stock market” index funds. More than 80 years of stock market history confirm that portfolios of smaller stocks have produced a higher rate of return than the return of the S&P 500 large-company index. While smaller companies are undoubtedly less stable and riskier than large firms, they are likely—on average—to produce somewhat higher future returns. Total stock market index funds are the better way for investors to benefit from the long-run growth of economic activity.

Nowhere is historian George Santayana’s famous dictum, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” more applicable than in finance. Financial history provides us with invaluable wisdom about the nature of the capital markets and of returns on securities. Intelligent investors ignore this record at their peril. Risk

...there should be no place in a portfolio for hedge funds. There are lots of reasons, but the main one is simple: Investing in hedge funds is a great way to increase the odds of underperformance.

Gold belongs only in the portfolios of fearmongers and speculators. If you own gold in your portfolio, expect to not get paid an income, pay higher taxes on your returns, take a more volatile ride than the stock market, and get a long-term return lower than bonds.

Mutual fund investors, too, have inflated ideas of their own omniscience. They pick funds based on the recent performance superiority of fund managers, or even their long-term superiority, and hire advisers to help them do the same thing. But, the advisers do it with even less success (see Chapters 8, 9, and 10). Oblivious of the toll taken by costs, fund investors willingly pay heavy sales loads and incur excessive fund fees and expenses, and are unknowingly subjected to the substantial but hidden transaction costs incurred by funds as a result of their hyperactive portfolio turnover. Fund investors are confident that they can easily select superior fund managers. They are wrong.

Mixing a broad index fund with small-cap value has produced the best results. U.S. equities are a core position in almost every growth investor’s portfolio.

The broad U.S. market returned 10.9 percent annually from 1950 to 2009. That handily beat the 6.1 percent return on five-year Treasury notes and the 3.8 percent level of inflation. Table 6-1 shows the inflation-adjusted returns over different periods of time. Inflation-adjusted returns are also known as real returns because that is the amount of purchasing power investors gained or lost. The real return does not include taxes. Real returns reinforce the fact that inflation is an invisible tax on all investments. The portion of return that is related to inflation cannot be counted as investment gain. When creating an asset allocation for your portfolio, you should always consider the expected real return of the investments you are considering. TABLE

I would add that I am not persuaded that international funds are a necessary component of an investor’s portfolio. Foreign funds may reduce a portfolio’s volatility, but their economic and currency risks may reduce returns by a still larger amount. The idea that a theoretically optimal portfolio must hold each geographical component at its market weight simply pushes me further than I would dream of being pushed. (I explore the pros and cons of global investing in Chapter 8.) My best judgment is that international holdings should comprise 20 percent of equities at a maximum, and that a zero weight is fully acceptable in most portfolios.

But it is the long-term merits of the index fund—broad diversification, weightings paralleling those of the stocks that comprise the market, minimal portfolio turnover, and low cost—that commend it to wise investors. Consider these words from perhaps the wisest investor of all, Warren E. Buffett, from the 1996 Annual Report of Berkshire Hathaway Corporation: Most investors, both institutional and individual, will find that the best way to own common stocks is through an index fund that charges minimal fees. Those following this path are sure to beat the net results (after fees and expenses) delivered by the great majority of investment professionals.

Investors tend to be touchingly naïve about stockbrokers and mutual fund companies: brokers are not your friends, and the interests of the fund companies are highly divergent from yours.

when a publicly listed company decides to go private again, as Dell Computers did in 2013. Take this setback with decorum, receive your cash, keep it in your cash portfolio, and wait for the next opportunity. A proxy fight or even becoming a private investor in a new entity is not worth your work and time -- especially for individual investors.   Listen

The average actively managed mutual fund charges about one percentage point of assets each year for managing the portfolio. It is the expenses charged by professional “active” managers that drag their return well below that of the market as a whole. Low-cost index funds charge only one-tenth as much for portfolio management. Index funds do not need to hire highly paid security analysts to travel around the world in a vain attempt to find “undervalued” securities. In

A major advantage of indexing is that index funds are tax efficient. Actively managed funds can create large tax liabilities if you hold them outside your tax-advantaged retirement plans. To the extent that your funds generate capital gains from their portfolio turnover, this active trading creates taxable income for you. And short-term capital gains are taxed at ordinary income tax rates that can go well over 50 percent when state income taxes are considered. Index funds, in contrast, are long-term buy-and-hold investors and typically do not generate significant capital gains or taxable income. To

Peter Bernstein and Robert Arnott reflected on this question in a recent article in the Journal of Portfolio Management: “Bull Market? Bear Market? Should You Really Care?” They concluded that “for most long-term investors, bull markets are not nearly as beneficial, and bear markets not nearly as damaging as most investors seem to think.” They noted, correctly, that “a bull market raises the asset value, but delivers a proportionate reduction in the prospective real yields that the portfolio can deliver from that point forward, while a bear market does the reverse, reducing portfolio value, which is largely offset by an increase in prospective yields, other things being equal.

Some public pension plans are responding to the continued disappointing returns. The California Public Sector Retirement System (CalPERS) is often regarded as a thought leader among other pension funds, and with over $300 billion in assets it is one of the largest institutional investors in the world. In September 2014 it announced (CalPERS 2014) the elimination of hedge funds from its portfolio, concluding that the cost of investing wasn't justified by the returns. One interesting disclosure was that in the most recent fiscal year through June 2014, CalPERS had paid $135 million in fees on a $4 billion portfolio that earned 7.1%. The approximately $280 million in investment returns ($4 billion × 7.1%) means that for every $2 in returns, it paid away a third dollar in fees. Of the gross returns (i.e., before fees), two-thirds went to CalPERS and one-third to the hedge fund managers. When you consider that it's possible to invest in equity index funds for less than 0.1%, this division of investment profits between the provider of capital and the managers must have appeared as absurd to CalPERS as it does to everyone else.

Take the five stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average with the lowest stock prices and highest dividend yields. Discard the one with the lowest price. Put 40% of your money in the stock with the second-lowest price. Put 20% in each of the three remaining stocks. One year later, sort the Dow the same way and reset the portfolio according to steps 1 through 4. Repeat until wealthy. Over

The selection of common stocks for the portfolio of the defensive investor should be a relatively simple matter. Here we would suggest four rules to be followed: 1. There should be adequate though not excessive diversification. This might mean a minimum of ten different issues and a maximum of about thirty.† 2. Each company selected should be large, prominent, and conservatively financed. Indefinite as these adjectives must be, their general sense is clear. Observations on this point are added at the end of the chapter. 3. Each company should have a long record of continuous dividend payments. (All the issues in the Dow Jones Industrial Average met this dividend requirement in 1971.) To be specific on this point we would suggest the requirement of continuous dividend payments beginning at least in 1950.* 4. The investor should impose some limit on the price he will pay for an issue in relation to its average earnings over, say, the past seven years. We suggest that this limit be set at 25 times such average earnings, and not more than 20 times those of the last twelve-month period. But such a restriction would eliminate nearly all the strongest and most popular companies from the portfolio. In particular, it would ban virtually the entire category of “growth stocks,” which have for some years past been the favorites

Mutual funds are the ultimate way for a defensive investor to capture the upside of stock ownership without the downside of having to police your own portfolio.

The ideal way to dollar-cost average is into a portfolio of index funds, which own every stock or bond worth having. That way, you renounce not only the guessing game of where the market is going but which sectors of the market—and which particular stocks or bonds within them—will do the best.

Great intelligence and good luck are not required. The essential characteristics of the successful investor are the discipline and stamina to, in the words of John Bogle, “stay the course.” Investing is not a destination. It is an ongoing journey through its four continents—theory, history, psychology, and business.

The fact is almost anyone can achieve positive absolute returns in a trending up market. Watch TV and listen to market pundits, buy the hot stocks of the day, and ignore valuation. Growth and momentum have been the lessons learned by new portfolio managers in the 2010s. Only when the tide goes out, do you discover who has been swimming naked. —Warren Buffett When the tide goes out, good investors create outperformance. Global central banks have made sure the tide has not gone out for a decade. US equity market drawdowns of more than 10% have occurred only four times in the last decade and each drawdown has lasted less than 60 days.

Thus I dismiss macro prediction as something that will bring investment success for the vast majority of investors, and I certainly include myself in that group. If that’s so, what’s left? While there are lots of details and nuances, I think we can most gainfully spend our time in three general areas: trying to know more than others about what I call “the knowable”: the fundamentals of industries, companies and securities, being disciplined as to the appropriate price to pay for a participation in those fundamentals, and understanding the investment environment we’re in and deciding how to strategically position our portfolios for it.

As I travel around the financial services industry today, the most interesting trend I see is the one toward relationship consolidation. Now that Glass-Steagall has been repealed, and all financial services providers can provide just about all financial services, there's a tendency - particularly as people get older - to want to tie everything up... to develop a plan, which implies having a planner. A planner, not a whole bunch of 'em... You've got basically two options. One is that you can sit here and wait for a major investment firm, which handles your client's investment portfolio while you handle the insurance, to bring their developing financial and estate planning capabilities to your client's door. And to take over the whole relationship. In this case, you have chosen to be the Consolidatee. A better option is for you to be the Consolidator. That is, you go out and consolidate the clients' financial lives pursuant to a really great plan - the kind you pride yourselves on. And of course that would involve your taking over management of the investment portfolio. Let's start with the classic Ibbotson data [Stocks, Bonds, Bills and Inflation Yearbook, Ibbotson Associates]. In the only terms that matter to the long-term investor - the real rate of return - he [the stockholder] got paid more like three times what the bondholder did. Why would an efficient market, over more than three quarters of a centry, pay the holders of one asset class anything like three times what it paid the holders of the other major asset class? Most people would say: risk. Is it really risk that's driving the premium returns, or is it volatility? It's volatility.... I invite you to look carefully at these dirty dozen disasters: the twelve bear markets of roughly 20% or more in the S&P 500 since the end of WWII. For the record, the average decline took about thirteen months from peak to trough, and carried the index down just about 30%. And since there've been twelve of these "disasters" in the roughly sixty years since war's end, we can fairly say that, on average, the stock market in this country has gone down about 30% about one year in five.... So while the market was going up nearly forty times - not counting dividends, remember - what do we feel was the major risk to the long-term investor? Panic. 'The secret to making money in stocks is not getting scared out of them' Peter Lynch.

Environmental influences almost invariably point investors down the path to investment failure. Advertisements flog stocks at equity market peaks, with nary a mention of diversifying fixed-income assets. After stocks suffer bear-market losses, the media tout the beneficial effects of owning bonds as an important part of a well-balanced portfolio. The overwhelming bulk of messages to investors suggest owning yesterday’s darling and avoiding yesterday’s goat.

What they don’t realize is this is because of the inadvertent Coffee Can style of investing that they adopt in real estate as against the trading style in their stock portfolios, i.e. when it comes to real estate, investors are happy to buy and hold for long periods of time. As a result, they end up holding their properties through thick and thin, which is why they are able to see an appreciation in the value. In contrast, in equity, investors typically end up buying at the peak, trade frequently and then exiting at the bottom. The harshness of most investors’ experience of the stock market versus their happier experience in real estate is, therefore, in part self-inflicted rather than being due to the underlying nature of these asset classes.

Growth-Stock Approach Every investor would like to select the stocks of companies that will do better than the average over a period of years. A growth stock may be defined as one that has done this in the past and is expected to do so in the future.2 Thus it seems only logical that the intelligent investor should concentrate upon the selection of growth stocks. Actually the matter is more complicated, as we shall try to show. It is a mere statistical chore to identify companies that have “out-performed the averages” in the past. The investor can obtain a list of 50 or 100 such enterprises from his broker.† Why, then, should he not merely pick out the 15 or 20 most likely looking issues of this group and lo! he has a guaranteed-successful stock portfolio? There are two catches to this simple idea. The first is that common stocks with good records and apparently good prospects sell at correspondingly high prices. The investor may be right in his judgment of their prospects and still not fare particularly well, merely because he has paid in full (and perhaps overpaid) for the expected prosperity. The second is that his judgment as to the future may prove wrong. Unusually rapid growth cannot keep up forever; when a company has already registered a brilliant expansion, its very increase in size makes a repetition of its achievement more difficult. At some point the growth curve flattens out, and in many cases it turns downward.

Successful stock-picking isn’t mysterious, but it does take some time, effort, and analysis. And the effort is worthwhile because stocks are a convenient and important part of most investors’ portfolios.

Over a 10- or 20- or 30- year investment horizon, Mr. Market’s daily dipsy-doodles simply do not matter. In any case, for anyone who will be investing for years to come, falling stock prices are good news, not bad, since they enable you to buy more for less money. The longer and further stocks fall, and the more steadily you keep buying as they drop, the more money you will make in the end—if you remain steadfast until the end. Instead of fearing a bear market, you should embrace it. The intelligent investor should be perfectly comfortable owning a stock or mutual fund even if the stock market stopped supplying daily prices for the next 10 years.11 Paradoxically, “you will be much more in control,” explains neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, “if you realize how much you are not in control.” By acknowledging your biological tendency to buy high and sell low, you can admit the need to dollar-cost average, rebalance, and sign an investment contract. By putting much of your portfolio on permanent autopilot, you can fight the prediction addiction, focus on your long-term financial goals, and tune out Mr. Market’s mood s

What’s Your Foreign Policy? Investing in foreign stocks may not be mandatory for the intelligent investor, but it is definitely advisable. Why? Let’s try a little thought experiment. It’s the end of 1989, and you’re Japanese. Here are the facts: Over the past 10 years, your stock market has gained an annual average of 21.2%, well ahead of the 17.5% annual gains in the United States. Japanese companies are buying up everything in the United States from the Pebble Beach golf course to Rockefeller Center; meanwhile, American firms like Drexel Burnham Lambert, Financial Corp. of America, and Texaco are going bankrupt. The U.S. high-tech industry is dying. Japan’s is booming. In 1989, in the land of the rising sun, you can only conclude that investing outside of Japan is the dumbest idea since sushi vending machines. Naturally, you put all your money in Japanese stocks. The result? Over the next decade, you lose roughly two-thirds of your money. The lesson? It’s not that you should never invest in foreign markets like Japan; it’s that the Japanese should never have kept all their money at home. And neither should you. If you live in the United States, work in the United States, and get paid in U.S. dollars, you are already making a multilayered bet on the U.S. economy. To be prudent, you should put some of your investment portfolio elsewhere—simply because no one, anywhere, can ever know what the future will bring at home or abroad. Putting up to a third of your stock money in mutual funds that hold foreign stocks (including those in emerging markets) helps insure against the risk that our own backyard may not always be the best place in the world to invest.

The investor with a portfolio of sound stocks should expect their prices to fluctuate and should neither be concerned by sizable declines nor become excited by sizable advances. He should always remember that market quotations are there for his convenience, either to be taken advantage of or to be ignored. He should never buy a stock because it has gone up or sell one because it has gone down. He would not be far wrong if this motto read more simply: “Never buy a stock immediately after a substantial rise or sell one immediately after a substantial drop.

Here are some of the handicaps mutual-fund managers and other professional investors are saddled with: With billions of dollars under management, they must gravitate toward the biggest stocks—the only ones they can buy in the multimillion-dollar quantities they need to fill their portfolios. Thus many funds end up owning the same few overpriced giants. Investors tend to pour more money into funds as the market rises. The managers use that new cash to buy more of the stocks they already own, driving prices to even more dangerous heights. If fund investors ask for their money back when the market drops, the managers may need to sell stocks to cash them out. Just as the funds are forced to buy stocks at inflated prices in a rising market, they become forced sellers as stocks get cheap again. Many portfolio managers get bonuses for beating the market, so they obsessively measure their returns against benchmarks like the S & P 500 index. If a company gets added to an index, hundreds of funds compulsively buy it. (If they don’t, and that stock then does well, the managers look foolish; on the other hand, if they buy it and it does poorly, no one will blame them.) Increasingly, fund managers are expected to specialize. Just as in medicine the general practitioner has given way to the pediatric allergist and the geriatric otolaryngologist, fund managers must buy only “small growth” stocks, or only “mid-sized value” stocks, or nothing but “large blend” stocks.6 If a company gets too big, or too small, or too cheap, or an itty bit too expensive, the fund has to sell it—even if the manager loves the stock. So