“Buy and Hold” No More: The Resurgence of Active Trading
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There will always be a mix of active and passive.
Fundamentally - passive only works when it follows smart active. Actives do expensive research and trade against each other to arrive at the consensus price. Passives trade at that price for "free." Since both get the same price on average but passives incur no cost, they win on average
This breaks down if passives outnumber actives, or if actives are exceptionally stupid.
Imagine 100% is passive. That means any stock in an index will be bought tomorrow and forever regardless of price. I could exploit that in a ton of ways. For example, do a "squeeze" (think of the recent GME short squeeze but in reverse.)
Or, imagine company X will obviously default but stock keeps going up because passives are obligated to buy. Very easy to exploit by going active!
Finally - think about this. Does your index fund have any GME? That part of your portfolio trades at the price set by Reddit apes. The more of that goes on, the more tempting it is to go "active" on the other side.
That said, I as a buyer-and-holder, I welcome the hordes of active traders willing to expend time, effort, and money to discover the price that I too will be able to trade at.
Reverse how? There are so many axis I don't know which to use as the basis of my flip. If you care to, please explain a bit more in detail.
But, sure. Let's say I know that you (index fun) are obligated to buy stock X tomorrow and over all foreseeable future. I am gonna hoard those shares at no risk and sell them to you at a VERY VERY painful price, since you have no room to say "that's too expensive, no thanks"
source: Any prospectus/annual report of a large index fund, such as VTI.
Simplest example I cited already: it becomes obvious that company X will default in short order, but it's a member of an index and the market will "buy" it anyway: I can short it (by borrowing from the passives and selling it to them next time they buy the index) and never have to cover since it's bankrupt. That's a simple example of a single-player active skewering the passives.
You can try to figure out what this means in terms of tracking error but it's kinda irrelevant to my point.
In the world as it stands today, passive ETFs and index mutual funds are a huge source of shares to lend. It's one of the ways they can lower the cost of the passive fund (or slightly increase returns above the passive benchmark), as the proceeds from lending shares are returned to investors in the fund. (Not always, but the good ETF operators do this.)
Passive investors who only invest in the S&P 500 didn't enjoy the ride up. But there are plenty of other indexes that people invest in passively that would have held TSLA prior to being added to the S&P 500.
I own SCHB, for example, which tracks the Dow Jones U.S. Broad Stock Market index, and would have owned shares in TSLA long before it was added to the S&P 500.
But then I had the question: When the world has gone passive, who is left as an active investor?
1. Wallstreetbets users who do poorly on average, and they are small
2. Highly skilled Hedgefunds like Medallion who do great on average, but they are small
3. ... the company using debt to buyback its own shares
So the key behind this entire stock market is that its a beauty contest where you need to make guesses as to what everyone else will do. But as active investors shrink with the increase in passive, what we are allowing happen is that the companies who use debt to buyback their shares are whats driving the market. Every dollar they spend on their stock is then magnified 100x by the big passive funds, and both 1 & 2 have no agency other than to try to get swept up in the winds.
I have not yet done the intensive research to understand how large 3 can effect a stock, does anyone here have any idea if this will be a problem, and if we are already seeing signs that this is happening already?
The thing is that I'd rather be doing other things with my time, so I'm a passive investing kind of guy. Imagine getting the market return for doing nearly nothing for dirt cheap. That's a high growth rate to level of effort ratio!
But I think a key point is that active investing already exists and dominates the market -- it's still like 85% active. People choosing to invest in passively managed funds are doing so because they see a higher return. Maybe the choice is sticky and people won't switch back if the returns begin to fall, but people still have to switch in.
So building up a surplus of passive investors requires people to continue to switch to a passive strategy after the returns between passive and active level out and reverse. And not just a little -- profits from investing are returned to investors, and reinvested. So if the equilibrium between active and passive investing is X% of the market passive, and we get up to passive investors at X+10% of the market, then the X+10% of passive investors will see a lower rate of return than the 90-X% of active investors. Which means -- unless those active investors take their surplus profits and dump them into then-less-profitable passive funds, before long the active investors will have 91-X% of the market and the passive investors will have 9+X%. Absent continued switching, the feedback of profit re-investment will push the balance back to equilibrium.
He goes into a lot of data around the idea that the market is "too passive", and he believes that we were already at that point last year before the pandemic.
A market is "too passive" when it becomes exploitable due to perfect predictability. But - that is the very thing that will keep it from ever reaching that level of passivity. Exploiting it is an active step, then someone else bets against the exploiter, etc.
Medallion usually does well, but hedge funds underperformed in the 2010's.
That's a bit of an understatement. The lowest yearly return since 1990 after fees and expenses has been 20%. Since 2005 their lowest yearly return has been 29%.
They practically print their own money. Their strategies appear to have low capacity, I'll give you that.
I've always found stock buybacks intriguing and confusing. Here's a hypothetical scenario that seems to go against what you're saying:
Company A buys back $1 work of stock. Since there is now $1 less in Company A's bank account, that company is now worth $1 less. So the market cap should in theory be $1 less. Since the market cap should be $1 less, and $1 of stock disappeared, those perfectly balance out and mean the stock price should stay the same.
Now the index investors take a look at the situation. Company A's market cap has shrunk, whereas other companies' market caps haven't. So Company A has a smaller share of the index than other companies than it had before. But the index investors still have the old ratio of Company A to other companies, so they are overinvested in Company A. They all sell a bit of Company A in order to get the correct balance according to the index. Company A goes down in value.
So a stock buyback caused the price to go down.
When you do a buyback, the book value drops (company loses cash), but the discounted future cash flows remains unchanged. The number of outstanding shares also drops.
The net result is the stock price increases as a company accumulates cash and uses it for buybacks because the number of outstanding shares drops.
Another way of thinking about it is that it's the same as dividends, but the dividend only goes to the sellers of the stock during a buyback.
The whole book value + discounted future cash flow does not reflect the real stock exchange at all. If that was the case no investor would want share buybacks because as you say it would only reward the ones who sell...
When taking into account offer and demand stock buybacks make more sense: the buyback increase the demand for the stock. The offer will increase a bit (a few might sell) but not in the same proportion because the offer is not very elastic (most of your investors are in for a long ride and are not going to sell), so the price goes up, you get rid of some short term investors, and the long term investors see their share increasing in value. Everybody's happy and the dividend ratios do not mean anything anymore.
Initially:
market cap = $100
book value = $20
discounted future cash flows = $80
share price = $1
number of outstanding shares = 100
After the buyback:
market cap = $99
book value = $19
discounted future cash flows = $80
share price = $1
number of outstanding shares = 99
So the market cap didn't change.
I agree it's effectively the same as dividends (although I think buybacks are slightly better for the taxes of stockholders).
The best example is Berkshire Hathaway stock (BRK A share) which currently trades at $402,620 per share.
With more and more assets going into passive funds, when might we actually see them owning such large fractions of companies that a play like this is possible? Google suggests that 10-15% of the SP500 is owned by mutual funds. Presumably there's going to be an inflection point where this becomes problematic.
Index funds need to rebalance so they’re not just holding, but it seems like for passive investors, they approximate holding? Maybe the rebalancing would tend to exaggerate the effects of active trading?
For more recent (and much more technically difficult) treatment, you can take a look at Garleanu and Pederson (2018) ("Efficiently Inefficient Markets for Asset and Asset Management").
No, actives can make money on average. If the actives do expensive research and learn things, they can buy good stocks at low (below-fair-value-given-new-knowledge) prices, drive up the price, and the passives follow later, buying at high (fair) prices. No one needs to lose, but actives accrue a disproportionate fraction of the gains.
> This breaks down if passives outnumber actives
Hypothetically there is a level of passive investing where the system breaks, but (1) this has nothing to do with 50% threshold (a small active minority can be fine) and (2) the are natural strong forces that prevent this from happening (as the fraction of passives increases, the reward for being active increases, drawing in more actives).
Also, saying "no more" to refer to a blip fad is a ridiculous healdit.
Betting exchanges can offer good liquidity, tight spreads and commissions as low as 2%
I agree that there is a lot of gambling and excessive risk taking going on. And I myself stick to a 3 ETF portfolio because I like the simplicity. But to call it almost entirely just gambling I think is missing the point. There is some interesting and good stuff happening now in the intersection of social media and low cost trading, and it makes sense I think for VCs to be investing in that space.
That's a bit of an oversimplification because I do have some other assets I've picked up over the years. But the bulk of my net worth is invested in those 3.
If I were to start over again I might even just hold SCHB, which I feel has enough international exposure to make SCHF and SCHE somewhat redundant, while also being more efficient for taxation purposes.
Canada has a lot of resource companies which largely follow the global economy.
Most big corps have less than half of their sales in US.
Developed markets still pay with a visa/MasterCard and have iphones. Or the US owns a stake in their local equivalent. Or Amazon is expanding there.
Truly emerging markets barely have a stock market, but their citizens probably eye a Coca Cola, have an intel PC and an android phone doing searches on Google.
Do you happen to have those links?
As an example, I did do a quick search just now on YouTube and a guy named Charlie Chang came up. [1]
I haven't actually watched any of his videos before, but I took a look through his introductory video and it all looks like pretty sound advice to me. He also does monthly videos where he recommends specific stock picks, and his fundamentals-based approached seemed totally reasonable to me. This is the type of content I had in mind when I said there are reasonable videos being published on YouTube.
It is difficult to convey this because, in the end, you have no idea either so you don't know whether there is useful stuff on YouTube or if I am just talking nonsense too...but it is so bad, and it gives the misleading impression that picking stocks is very easy. It isn't, people do CFAs (allegedly, a hard exam), MBAs, and work in fund management every day for decades...and will never come close to being profitable (indeed, what is amazing is how many people have no knowledge but end up doing okay...it is remarkable...the post is a perfect example, no content, no apparent understanding of investing...somehow the guy is a billionaire from investing, like Chamath...amazing).
It is gambling (the distinction between gambling and investing is information), what most VCs are doing in the space is financial terrorism (stuff like WealthFront is an unbelievable scam, it is 1980s-style financial advice), and most people should take your approach (although it is still very easy to go wrong with 3 ETFs...most people will get there though).
One of the big advantages that savers have today are open platforms (there was a time when fund managers ran their own platforms), low dealing costs, low spreads, and ETFs. All that investors need to do is just work out the asset allocation themselves and they will save huge amounts. And I would guess 95% of people reading this are able to do it.
Just to be clear, we are looking for a least bad situation. Asset allocation is very complex, there is no way most investors can get an amazing result themselves but what most investors don't know is that WealthFront have zero chance too. So the aim is to equal what they do without their mad fees (I have no idea how they charge so much, marketing? I don't know, I know small advisers that were profitable charging lower fees...it makes no sense).
This doesn't matter for a retirement account, though.
[1] https://support.wealthfront.com/hc/en-us/articles/209348486-...
Wealthfront has economies of scale to write a program to perform tax loss harvesting automatically. Just because it's not worthwhile for me to do it manually myself doesn't make it not worthwhile for a program to do it automatically. Wealthfront does daily tax loss harvesting on individual stocks. That would be a tremendous amount of work for me to do manually.
That said, I don't know whether Wealthfront's benefit outweighs their 0.25% fee.
I guess what we really need is a well-regarded open source program that hooks into brokerage's API and does this advanced tax loss harvesting.
Does WealthFront do anything at the individual stock level? My understanding from looking at their landing page [1] is that they basically just allocate your money across a number of publicly traded ETFs:
> How do you choose my investments?
> We choose exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that track an index, such as the S&P 500 or emerging markets. Wealthfront chooses the ETFs with the lowest costs and proper tracking of their index.
Also, you pay the expense ratios of those ETFs in addition to the fees that WealthFront charges:
> What are the costs to invest?
> We’re glad you asked. Our annual advisory fee is 0.25%. On average, you’ll also pay a low 0.06%–0.13% expense ratio. Companies who run investment funds charge this fee, and it comes straight out of that fund’s performance (you aren’t billed directly). Everyone who invests in ETFs pays this fee.
I think would be fairly easy for any ETF investor to approximate WealthFront's tax-loss harvesting strategy in their own brokerage accounts. E.g. simply go in once a quarter and sell any lots of VOO for a loss where possible, and replace with an equivalent like SPY.
https://support.wealthfront.com/hc/en-us/articles/211005023-...
(I am a customer.)
> For example, if an investor sells the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) at a loss, they can immediately turn around and purchase the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF.
> The rationale is that the two S&P 500 ETFs have different fund managers, different expense ratios, may replicate the underlying index using a different methodology, and may have different levels of liquidity in the market. Presently, the IRS does not deem this type of transaction as involving substantially identical securities and so it is allowed, although this may be subject to change in the future as the practice becomes more widespread.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/substantiallyidenticals...
>There has been no IRS ruling on whether ETFs from two different companies that track the same index are considered substantially identical.
https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/investment-products...
>Investment advisors and tax planners recommend against selling an index mutual fund from one fund company and buying another index fund tracking the same stock index from another mutual fund company.
https://finance.zacks.com/substantially-identical-mutual-fun...
>And while arguably swapping from index funds like SPY to IVV are almost certainly a wash sale abuse (or at least, a transaction that should trigger the wash sale rules)
https://www.kitces.com/blog/the-wash-sale-problem-when-tax-l...
If you look at Wealthfront's own documentation, when they do tax loss harvesting with ETFs, they find ETFs that track similar but not identical indexes:
https://research.wealthfront.com/whitepapers/tax-loss-harves...
Can someone help me understand this comment as to my knowledge WeathFront (WF) fees were the lowest in the industry. For example people talk about Vanguard fees as also being low but they're between 0.25% and 1% [1]. If it makes a difference I'm specifically coming at it from the lens of IRA retirement contributions.
Is the parent post saying the alternative is to figure out what specific stocks/ETF/index WF is purchasing and then purchase those with something like eTrade?
TIA
On the other hand, you pay that 0.25% fee that WealthFront charges every year, regardless of the performance of your portfolio, and it can pretty quickly amount to thousands of dollars per year.
Most brokerages (Vanguard, Schwab, Robinhood, etc) don't charge any sort of equivalent fee - they are free to open and maintain. And yes it is fairly easy to construct an equivalent portfolio made up of ETFs in a standard brokerage account. You would be losing out on the convenience of WealthFront's automated rebalancing and tax-lost harvesting, though.
Is the convenience of automated investment, rebalancing, and tax-lost harvesting worth paying 0.25% of your total account balance every year? For me, no. But I know some people who are really happy with services like WealthFront and Betterment. Especially for someone just getting started with investing, I would have no issues recommending those services.
Edit: also just noticed you are referring to a retirement account. In that case, WF's tax-loss harvesting feature would not be applicable (since retirement accounts are tax-free), so even less of an incentive to go with WF vs. DIY.
Would you mind just mentioning what that is?
A crazy thing went on early with ETH bot trading. Of course, if you are going to download a bot from Github which works on a few trends and technical indicators, you should not expect to make a lot of money. But many did -- It is easy to predict whether a rocket is going up. The features the bot used are still indicative (at other timeframes), because so many were running them, influencing the price in future timeframes.
> misleading impression that picking stocks is very easy
At least picking a stock yourself is easier than predicting what stock someone else will pick.
> MBAs, and work in fund management every day for decades...and will never come close to being profitable
That seems like a cosy lifestyle not worth bragging about, good job security. Rooting for the night janitor at a small hotel though, who put a 1000$ on doge coin when first reading about the rememe potential.
But I agree with the gambling and financial terrorism for kicks. More as a warning against financial irresponsibility, less as in "stay of my turf!".
gamestop was the example of what happens in the limit - only the DTCC prevented a global financial crisis as a circuit breaker of last resort.
>> if enough gamblers stick to one ticker, they can break the market
HF's, I assume, has had this power all along and they probably tried more than once to break the market.
So, what's the difference then, between internet hive minds and HFs and why should one take more blame than the other when it comes to "breaking things"?
Casinos wont let you put a billion $$$ on red or black just because they have a 1/37 edge on the roulette wheel. That variance is to high.
There are failure modes
Casinos need to ensure that they have enough liquidity to withstand a large bet hitting. The law of large numbers only works if you can survive the short term swings.
True heroes. God love em.
(Friendly reminder that the DTCC is basically owned by "Wall Street".)
Nonsense, a few private funds losing a lot of money is not a financial crisis, it's just another Tuesday.
Risky activities tend to hurt more investors than they help, and lead to a small number of big winners and many losers. You can't just increase risk and increase reward for everyone.
Regarding the predicament Gen Z is in, just remember that the older generations - one of which is very large - will need to sell their assets at some point. I know it's hard to hear, "Be patient" when you are young and have already been patient, but demographics is working against asset values in the next twenty years or so.
As someone who is about half way towards retirement, how is it best to work with this?
My future retirement income seems to be mostly dependant on having the right selection of investments for my pension account to grow in time for when I stop working. It's currently split between a few low cost, broad indexes. But if we expect asset values to go down as older generations sell off, am I going to see this pension pot fail to meet what I need it to in order to cover my retirement.
My pension advisor just seems to blindly follow the script of 'passive beats active', and expects 5% annual return. Which I just go along with, mostly because I have no idea what else to do. Am I being too pessimistic when I really can't see 5% return being likely.
How do I go about making sure my retirement is provided for. It kind of annoys me I have to seemingly be constantly figuring out the market situation to make decisions on what's best. Why do I need to be a stock market expert to manage my pension. What I'd much rather do is pay for a future pension more like an insurance plan. I pay monthly now, and some experts who know what they are doing worry about the investment strategy, and I just get a fixed pension payment.
Preferably wait till this period is over and rates rise. If there’s a salesman eager to speak to you, you’re looking at the wrong product.
Probably not all of their assets though. Most people don’t get a death date after 65. I guess if people want to blow most of it before 80 that might make sense but you never know when you’re going to go. Still need to hedge against inflation.
Some of their assets (mainly houses, I’d expect). Anything they don’t sell can pass to their heirs and likely will even get a tax break (step up in basis) instead of a tax hit (estate tax exclusion is huge, at the federal level).
I can't find the link now but I saw a recent paper that showed retirees aren't really spending down their investments in old age. Rather many of them will end up with more when they finally fall off their perch.
While the idea behind passive investing may seem like a good one, people often forget it's a double edge sword. By this I mean, when you invest into an ETF or index fund, that money in turn goes into everything underneath it. All too often that money isn't invested in the underlying equities in any intelligent way, and so some of it ends up in ridiculously bad equities. Because of this, there are complete zombie companies that are worth multi billions today, which sell no more than 2 widgets a year and haven't seen growth for nearly a decade... They are only worth so much because money keeps flowing into them from being apart of a hot ETF.
Conversely, look at super undervalued companies like JKS and CSIQ. JKS is the largest and fastest growing solar company in the world BTW. Yet these companies sit mostly under foreign market ETFs which have never been very popular, and hence why they largely remain undervalued.
ARKK are active investors because they're using discretion to pick specific investments.
They say so themselves: "ARKK is an actively managed ETF"
ARKK has been buying NNDM, yes, but:
- they're not passive. they're active.
- they only own 5% of the stock. almost any public stock will have at least 5% owned by some fund, so it's not notable and doesn't disprove the notion that it's retail driven.
- ARKK are known to pile into retail frenzy stocks, so that correlation is going to exist often.
[1] https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/nndm/instituti...
The vast majority of trade activity recently is from ARK. You can see this by looking at the link I showed and compare the strong correlation in rising stock prices and ARK buying. Alternatively any retail investors that jumped in, likely did so from news of ARK buying.
> Institutional Ownership % doesn't mean squat as far as trading activity goes. You and I could trade 1 share back and forth a billion times, and it wouldn't have any impact on institutional ownership %.
Institutional ownership does convey relevant information in regards to valuation, because it tells you who bought and didn't later sell, and therefore who contributed net buy flow over the last year.
Trades that get closed (i.e., trades that contribute to volume but not ownership) don't have permanent price impact in expectation, and are therefore not useful for answering the question of "why is this stock so high for no good reason?".
> The vast majority of trade activity recently is from ARK. You can see this by looking at the link I showed and compare how their "WEIGHT IN PROTFOLIO %' dropped despite their "SHARES HELD" has remained constant.
If portfolio % drops but shares held remained constant, that means they largely stopped trading NNDM and increased the size of their other (non-NNDM) holdings.
Also, that link shows they traded only a few million in volume in March in NNDM, but total NNDM volume over that month was in the hundreds of millions. So they only traded 1-2% of total volume.
> Dilution reduces Institutional Ownership %, as well as individuals ownership %
Institutional ownership merely means (shares held by institutions)/(total shares available). It does not signify anything more, and valuation cannot be inferred from such information. Changes in institutional ownership may signify what you are arguing, but it's a slippery slope.
Anyhow pricing and valuation is all dictated by trading activity. And prices can change massively even with little to no institutional ownernship % or changes thereof.
>If portfolio % drops but shares held remained constant, that means they largely stopped trading NNDM and increased the size of their other (non-NNDM) holdings
You are correct, I mismatched and incorrectly worded what I meant.
>Also, that link shows they traded only a few million in volume in March in NNDM, but total NNDM volume over that month was in the hundreds of millions
What I meant to show here was this was the period of obvious dilution. Look at the months prior to march and see the strong correlation to ARK trading and price rise. There were also offerings being made when ARK was buying, but look at when ARK stopped buying and how the price fell when dilution continued.
>Why do you say this? If they do an at-the-market offerring and sell it on-market primarily to retail bids, the retail ownership % will increase proportionally.
Again poorly worded on my part. I meant can reduce Institutional Ownership %...
Recent activity as of March may be retail activity, but that's not what I meant by recent. Using your very argument, if recent institutional ownership has dropped in March, it wouldn't go against the argument that I'm making that NNDM's price rise (as in starting from last years price at ~$1.58 in September) till recently, was largely fueled by ARK activity.
> Changes in institutional ownership may signify what you are arguing.
The level of institutional ownership (10%) is useful because it provides approximate/rough bounds on its changes over the last 12 months.
Take the limit to see why it's useful: If IO% is currently 0% (100%), we can conclude with some confidence that a protracted move from $0.5 to its current price of $7.5 is retail (institutional) driven.
An IO% of 10% doesn't conclusively show that a protracted move is retail driven (for a bunch of reasons, some of which you've highlighted), but it does suggest it (especially in this case where all traded volume is recent), absent better info.
> look at when ARK stopped buying and how the price fell
Retail in general has been selling since January. NNDM's January blow-off was largely GME-hype related, and since then all retail favourites have been weak.
Compare the NIO chart to the NNDM chart. They're completely unrelated but topped out at the identical dates and have sold off in the exact same way.
This strongly suggests correlation driven by retail flows. Why else would NNDM and NIO track each other so closely since January 2021?
> dilution continued.
https://www.bamsec.com/filing/121390021009721?cik=1643303
> Recent activity as of March may be retail activity, but that's not what I meant by recent.
We do have access to some info on this. https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/nndm/instituti...
Institutional ownership increased by 21.7M shares in 2020, a roughly 8.27% increase in total shares held. Meaning the current institutional ownership almost all came from last year, and ARK lead that by a wide margin.
But since this is a pretty small amount relative to total outstanding it implies that most buying has been retail.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NNDM/
And FNCMX is relatively small with only $11B in assets. So if you want us to take your argument seriously you'll have to provide a better example.
Uh... KOMP is the 3rd largest holder of NNDM and a passive fund. But regardless, whether these are passive/active is besides the point. Which is that most investment activity nowadays happen through vehicles that act as a basket of equities, and because of this, some of this money ends up flowing into bad equities given the vast majority of them don't trade on any sound fundamentals. I mean ARK surely doesn't, despite being actively managed.
How do active traders make money? Easy, they make money off of volatility and volatility increases as the market size increases. So greater passive share means more profit potential for active traders.
What is even the function of a trader? A trader is providing liquidity so that buyers and sellers can get fair prices for the thing they want to buy. Who are buyers and sellers? People who believe in the company or in the case of an index fund, people who believe in the index and expect it to net a return in the future. If there are not enough active traders then index funds will pay unfair prices and that is a loss for the index fund.
Now lets get to the meat of your post, zombie companies or rather low productivity companies are a function of interest rates and interest rates are set by the market and usually they are set based on inflation + desired margin. Inflation is low, or at least not high enough, so interest rates are relatively low. The Fed does control the interest rates to some extent but it does so for inflation targeting. However most of the time the Fed rate is slightly above the actual market rate, this is especially the case with negative interest rates where a lot of central banks want to stay above 0% if it is feasible. If inflation goes up the Fed will normalize the interest rates.
High interest rates are a barrier to companies with low returns. If your company makes a 2% return every year and your interest is 3% you will go out of business. If your company makes losses and obtains a 0%-1%% loan then it can stay afloat thanks to the debt.
Now the obvious problem is, if the Fed is doing everything it can to increase inflation and subsequently raise interest rates then why on earth do we see very low inflation? If interest rates are lower than inflation it means everyone (including foreign entities) is putting their money into savings. After all, if people spent it on consumer goods it would drive up prices and therefore inflation. So it isn't going there.
Actually, there is a way for consumer spending to increase savings. China is running a trade deficit by pegging their currency to the yuan. This means the government just outright buys USD so you can exchange them for yuan and the government stockpiles the USD in US treasury bonds. In my opinion they do this because China has an aging population, it's basically a retirement fund, when China is doing poorly they are hoping the US economy is doing well.
Ok, China (and pretty much everyone exporting in USD) is saving. Who else is saving? Retirement funds. The US has an aging population that puts money aside for retirement. It also has a retirement motto that everyone is supposed to save for themselves so even the working population is putting money aside. Rich people save a disproportionate percentage of their salary. They simply cannot spend all of it because they are simply that rich. Think of Bill Gates. A lesser effect also applies to city dwellers in top cities. They get paid a lot more than the countryside. Think of all the people on HN with stock compensation or people on HN who put their excess money into stocks. This portion is growing bigger over time. Automation plays into savings as well. Higher productivity means you can put more money into capital via machines that merely consume electricity instead of spending your money on workers who must consume food and water.
If everyone is saving and nobody is spending then how are workers supposed to get paid for their work? It's clearly impossible, unless that money is being invested and new jobs are being created. This is why people shouldn't put money under a mattress or why we don't want deflation. It will cause unemployment. Give it to your bank and your bank will give it to a company that creates jobs. But since interest is so low or in theory negative (banks don't pass negative interest on) the banks are basically telling you that they don't want your money and you should put it elsewhere.
Enter the stock market and housing market. Low yields in conventional markets (bank accounts, treasury bonds, mortgage bonds, etc) cause investors to flee these markets and enter riskier markets. They will spend it on stocks instead, they will also spend it on housing directly. That's where all those speculators that don't want to rent the house out come from. They aren't looking for a good investment, they are looking for an investment that isn't worse than conventional assets.
It's almost as if we have run out of good investments.
I'm also not sure that I buy the argument made elsewhere in this thread that you need active to make passive work. Indexes upon which funds are based often have a system of rules for how individual stocks are added and removed from the index that are based on the companies financial performance which is what ultimately drives the stock.
It's not so much about time-frames but rather familiarity with the details of a company or sector, but the term you're looking for is probably value investing.
Um, yes. Retail investors as a class lose money.
Remember, you're betting against people for whom this is their day job, work in a business that drops the losers, and have far more money than you.
Incorrect risk management from investment bankers, treating highly-variant finance as deterministic physics, and a fanciness of extremely smart people to invent extremely complex solutions, which obfuscate the ever-increasing assumptions and are less robust to black swan events. This illusory superiority bias over the common man, giving too much authority and decision-making power to a set of mathematical functions, and a culture of financial optimism and realization that you are too big to fail. This is what caused the big crash of 2007-2008.
The common man, as a class, lost money from that crash. In response, Bitcoin and fractional stocks were introduced. New markets emerged, where wearing a suit or MBA seems a negative, not a value add. Now, as a class, you at least have the possibility to win money. Else you always lose (but maybe that's the natural way it is supposed to be, not everyone can be the queen ant, or has the adaptation capacity to become one). BTW: every hedge fund that opened their data to the public, saw better, more accurate, models being build on that, than any of their elite quants in-house was able to beat. The masses, when harnassed, are no match for even the biggest hedge funds.
Post-IPO investing is essential to the IPO which is essential to VC which is essential to startups.
The pricing of post-IPO stocks is responsible for trillions of dollars of capital allocation, since the amount that public companies can raise is linearly proportional to the stock price.
It's not an unimportant problem to get right, unless you think it doesn't matter whether billions of dollars get allocated to GME versus MRNA.
A clown show where GME gets all the funding (due to its high stock price) and real companies don't is not going to lead to a productive and healthy economy.
The longest stock I've held is Boeing (40 years).
But there's a limit on how much you can contribute to an IRA. A serious investor will find the IRA contribution limits make it inconsequential. You also wouldn't want to fund the IRA with money you'll need before 65.
I think we are reaching the end of that era. I guess we shall see.
Long trade is definitely still around, just wait till everyone has other things to do
That isn't conventional wisdom. It's not someone's opinion. It's statistically proven reality. Whether you're an individual trader or a billionaire hedge fund manager, active strategies lose out to passive ones in the long run.
> has catalyzed a lean-in mindset around investing, particularly among Gen Z.
And it will burn them, just like it burned penny stock traders in the 80s and Internet stock traders in the late 90s.
The reality is Gen Z'ers are desperate at this point and they're turning to gambling in the hopes of making up lost economic ground. And if that happens en masse, it's not gonna be pretty.
Really? Because this is what the (grand)parent said:
"Whether you're an individual trader or a billionaire hedge fund manager, active strategies lose out to passive ones in the long run."
Clearly grandparent was not talking solely about the average investor.
Correct.
Too many passive index fund investors on this thread refuse to acknowledge that many hedge funds/proprietary trading firms consistently beat the S&P over 20-30+ years.
VTI and VOO are only 9% and 13% since inception in ~2001. Top quant firms like Citadel, Renaissance, Jane Street attain 20-40% annually after fees, over 20+ years.
On average, hedge funds underperform. But a UHNW investor is not investing in average hedge funds. They’re investing time-tested S&P-outperforming hedge funds.
The average person could never compete with RenTech.
Their historical record is very good.
Grandparent claimed that active investing is not good for _anybody_. A single example (like RenTech) is sufficient to disprove that claim. If you want to move the goalposts to "the average person", then it'll be an entirely different discussion.
In this simple model active investors in aggregate cannot do better than the index. Adding transaction costs, fees, etc. they'll do worse - as a group.
> The financial costs and benefits of DCA have also been examined in many studies using real market data, typically revealing that the strategy does not deliver on its promises and is not an ideal investment strategy.
> Recent research has highlighted the behavioural economic aspects of DCA, which allows investors to make a trade-off between the regret caused by not making the most of a rising market and that caused by investing into a falling market, which are known to be asymmetric.
Or if you got a $10k bonus, and invested it over 6 months or something.
FWIW, lump sum usually beats DCA in the long run.
Edit: also it’s important that you’re asset portfolio has asset classes that tend to be out of phase, like stocks vs bonds.
This claim is false. Some funds have overperformed year after year with high margins and (relatively) low risk, for decades. For example, Renaissance Technologies' Medallion Fund and Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. Please show me the "statistically proven reality" that explains these returns.
Closed to outsiders:
Medallion, +76%
Open to outsiders:
RIEF, -23%
RIDA, -34%
Also the external funds are different strategies than Medallion.
Since this is in reply to me, let me ask, what's the implication here? The tone of your post sounds like you disagree with me, but it's not clear what exactly you disagree with? Grandparent claimed that no-one can beat the market. I said that Renaissance Medallion Fund beats the market. Then you post a single-year performance of +76%, which is a really good performance for 2020. So... you agree with me?
I do think it's worth pointing out that that doesn't mean that the average retail investor will generally outperform the market, even if they're sophisticated enough to have even heard of Renaissance.
I’d rather have my AAPL over the last 5 years than VTI+BND.
The most popular index funds (VTI, VGT) only have a 20-year track record, with a paltry 9% and 13% annual return, respectively.
[1] https://www.clearbrookglobal.com/citadel-millennium-d-e-shaw...
Many funds consistently outperform the S&P by 2-3X over 30-40 years. Minimum investment, $5-10M, of course.
Buy and hold is the best option for those under USD $10 million net worth, but you must acknowledge there are semi-closed funds/prop trading firms that consistently beat the market.
But seriously, I'd rather just put money into VTI and VXUS and go back to playing video games, planning a D&D one-shot, programming a bit, or hanging out with friends in my spare time. Let the active traders waste their time poring over 10-Ks and/or charts. I'll be here having fun and taking what the market gives.
The same way you picked your passive index fund: look at 20-30+ years of data.
Unfortunately, VTI, VT, VOO all underperform the top hedge funds, when evaluated over 20 years (risk adjusted return, downside deviation, and absolute return). I’d go further back but VTI was created in 2001 whereas the hedge funds were created in 1980/1990.
Your statement that major index funds all underperform the top hedge funds is tautological, of course the ones that beat the averages are the top funds. What I'm genuinely curious is: how many hedge funds were there in 2001 and how would you identify the top ones?
The other important question is whether a retail investor can join it. I know someone like baobabKoodaa [1] would shout from the rooftops, "You're moving the goalposts, grandparent, waaaaaaaaaaah!" Well, I'm not grandparent, so my goalposts are completely different from theirs.
My goalpost is whether a retail investor like me can get in on those high-flying funds. If not, then in the retail universe, they may as well not exist. Thus, I'm better off investing in VTI/VXUS and using the rest of my spare time coming up with some funny ways to challenge my party in a D&D one-shot.
You can invest actively and intelligently. For example, my 401k offered an emerging markets fund (MGEMX) that isn’t the ideal fund from a cost structure perspective... but it performed really well for a few years. It wasn’t speculation or reckless behavior to have exposure to that sector. Portfolio rebalancing booked my gains when it was rising 30%, and I ended up doing well when 2008 killed that sector.
That doesn’t mean buy and hold doesn’t make sense either. If I was lucky and held on to an early fun money Bitcoin buy I’d be on an island right now!
Kenneth French (the "French" in the Fama-French asset pricing model) provides market data going back to 1972 [1] and can be used to reconstruct index fund performance.
Citadel doesn't have individual clients, and if you're not a billionaire I don't see how you'd gain access to their hedge fund.
[1] https://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/pages/faculty/ken.french/data...
...
Yep, I agree.
> 2. Buffet himself says: "In my view, for most people, the best thing to do is to own the S&P 500 index fund"
Again, we are in agreement. I'm not sure what exactly it is that you feel you disagree with me about? Grandparent claimed that _nobody_ can beat the market, and I provided references to evidence that some people can beat the market.
The Medallion fund is a whole other kettle of fish. Medallion uses extremely sophisticated models which took Jim Simons and his team of math wizards more than a decade to figure out, using vast amounts of historical data and computation. The fact that nobody else is replicating their performance should tell you just how difficult it is.
In 2019, 71% of actively managed funds lagged behind their benchmark according to the S&P. In 2020, it was "just" 57% [2]. Meanwhile, 70% of active funds have been liquidated the last 20 years. There are of course years where actively managed funds are the winners, but over time, actively managed funds tend toward the mean, either lagging or matching the S&P 500.
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3197185
[2] https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/spiva/spiva-us-y...
Yes, you have a market where participants trade against each other, and you discover that the average participant in the market does not "beat the market". That should be obvious. The question in dispute is whether _anyone_ can beat the market, and there's a mountain of evidence that certain people/funds beat the market year after year.
This is a problem for retail investors. Studies such as this one [1] have shown that the past performance of an actively managed fund does not predict its future returns. In other words, while there are certainly actively managed funds that beat the market in some years, a retail investor picking a mutual fund based on past performance is likely to be disappointed.
So how do you pick the fund that will give you high returns? Turns out this is exactly the same problem with individual stock picking, but instead of trying to pick winning stocks on the stock market, you are trying to pick winning managers in the mutual fund business. And your success in doing that ultimately comes down to chance.
[1] https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/does-mutual-fund-s-pa...
We are in 100% agreement.
I only wanted to correct the misinformation spread by grandparent who claimed that nobody can beat the market.
It should be noted that while markets may be mostly efficient, I do not think anyone is claiming they are completely efficient.
If there are price discrepancies/anomalies, they could be exploited, at least some of the time. It could be that Medallion can find some and exploit them, say, 55% of the time. But over a large volume of transactions.
Casinos make huge profits by exploit small house edges in volume:
* https://wizardofodds.com/gambling/house-edge/
There's a reason why Medallion has been closed for years: the (possible) market inefficiency exploits they're using may not scale.
This is false. Grandparent is specifically claiming that markets are completely efficient. Here is a direct quote: "Whether you're an individual trader or a billionaire hedge fund manager, active strategies lose out to passive ones in the long run."
In addition, many academics are also making this same ludicrous claim.
Some of the math surrounding the derivation of the weakest forms of EMT also relies on the assumption that everyone has access to the same information, which is patently false in the world we live in. Even retail traders sometimes have an information edge (e.g. working at a biotech company or a specialized industry like semiconductors)
Now, the initial assumption could very well hit a wall.
then consider just how much shares passive funds move all the time due to continuous rebalancing they do due to their self-imposed mandate. (reminder: etfs hold ~$5T worth of assets.)
One of the big selling points of passive, market weighted ETFs is their low turnover and high tax efficiency. Vanguard’s S&P 500 ETF (VOO) has an annual turnover of 4%, for example. That’s nothing compared to the turnover in an actively traded portfolio.
Sure they do a lot of trading volume to account for inflows and outflows from the ETF. But one of the very nice properties of market weighting is that there is hardly any rebalancing needed as individual assets drift in price.
Either both are or none are.
Holding an asset for N days does not magically flip it from category to the other.
Yes, if the market is overall rising, then active trading should enjoy that overall rise just like buy and hold does.
But then why active trade? Because you think you can do better than passive. That part - the "doing better" part - is zero sum. In fact it's negative sum, because of transaction costs.
https://web.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/active/active.htm
That doesn't mean there haven't been long-running active strategies that have worked. But those have overperformed by grabbing returns from other actives underperforming, not the passives.
If passive investors make worse trades with outsiders than the active investors do, they will underperfom.
Let me try to poke some holes in the argument.
1. Market return (M) is a weighted combination of passive (P) and actively managed portfolio (A) returns:
M = (1-w)P+(w)A.
2. Passive investor achieves market return M by holding the whole market, so P = M.
3. To satisfy the equation, A must also be M, regardless of w.
The logical error is in the assumption that P = M. To make this a concrete programming problem: let's say at time t=1, immediately prior to the start of a trading period, a passive investor decides to construct a portfolio. The passive investor makes investment allocations based on the current set of market prices.
Subsequently, how can the passive investor possibly match market returns without w being 0, or the passive investor knowing exactly how the active investors will allocate their holdings? That information lies in the future - one only needs to go though the exercise of simulating market returns on a discrete time basis to realize that the passive investor cannot possibly allocate to achieve exactly market returns.
M[1] = (1-w[1])P[1]+w[1]A[1]
Because all he has to do is do absolutely nothing and he achieves that. The passive investor doesn't make choices, he buys a portfolio that has all the components of the index in the proportions at that point. Then the active traders trade among themselves and the prices move. And now the passive investor still holds all the components in the index at the proportions at t=2 because he hasn't traded, only the assets have changed value. You can observe this in practice. Index funds track their index incredibly well.
There are hundreds of opportunities to do this every day, so you just jump on the most painfully obvious ones, and avoid anything uncertain.
If you have a real job, and can’t watch the market all day, every day, you don’t stand a chance. Without fail, the biggest losses in our group would come when someone tried to hop into a position while half watching the market, and then get sucked into their real work.
Once you’ve got entry down, the hardest part is training yourself to exit at the right time.
If we could I'd make a 20 year wager that every one of those people will fail to beat the market in the long run.
It's very easy to make money on "sophisticated strategies" during an historic 10 year bull run.
This is what I mean when I say treating it like it’s your job. Go back and look at the big downturn last year. To anyone who was paying attention, it looked like a car crash in slow motion.
Only to those of us with other work to do, did it look like a flash crash out of nowhere. The writing is very clearly on the wall for all of this stuff, because the big players needs days to reposition, and will be moving billions of shares, and you can literally watch them do it.
The reason active funds don’t do as well as the market is because they have to hedge. You’re always paying a premium to minimize losses when you’re hedging, and you can’t exit fast when your position is worth billions.
It’s like turning a freighter, versus turning a speed boat.
The market crashed last year because of COVID. Nobody saw that coming.
Everyone has been predicting a major correction or recession every year for at least the past 6 years. Claiming that they predicted what was going to happen last year is pretty blatant confirmation bias.
People predict a recession every year, and then when one finally hits, they say "see, I was right! Ignore all the years where it didn't happen!"
There will be another correction in the future, we don't know when it will hit, and the same pattern will play out again.
These people are also tracking senators and congress people’s positional moves, as additional macro indicators.
There's a lot of people who think they're smart enough to time the market, but have just been lucky. In the long run, that catches up to most of them, which is one of the reasons passive investing wins out in the end, on average
The posts said that gold would see decent increase (was around 1650$/kg at the time). That everyone with hotel or travel investments was expected to severely lose, and that most such players were putting their liquid money into other investments, to counter the blow, and avoid charges of insider trading. That the Euro would be the most stable currency, when currency trading due to localized pandemic and the lockdowns effecting purchasing power. That the US stock market will see a short boom, with Fed support, and little other investment opportunities, before a crash and world-wide stagnation will become inevitable. That you want to be in two growth niches for the next 3 years: biotech, for it will see free government-funded research & development, when it can profit in the future on new high-margin (HIV/Herpes) vaccines. Plastics industry, because everything will be wrapped in plastic, environmental regulation will be low priority, and it will be overlooked by retail and play-safe pension funds.
Not only did the financial elite predicted it, they predicted it right. Then felt bad for keeping it private, when they saw US senators selling their hotel stock positions after being informed of the situation in China and prospect of a pandemic, so they posted it publicly for everyone to see and with nothing to personally gain.
The pandemic was predicted (+5 -5 year error bars). The correction was predicted. Individual recession predictors are mostly made through survivor bias. When Goldman Sachs sees a market recession upcoming, they don't put that on Twitter or a newspaper to gain a following. They have people pay for what its worth.
It is also fun going back to 4chan /biz section 5 years. People are not saying now: see, I was right. They did better than the majority of the best, highest-paid, analysts and quants and remained anonymous. But I agree it was really hard to not hit a fish when shooting in a barrel.
I'm not saying it's impossible to make money - I just doubt you can intuitively get a sense for the "feel" of the market for something as largely traded as SPY. SPY traded 61 million shares yesterday (at $400 per). If the smartest institutional traders with the best tools can't figure out the direction of SPY in the short run with any kind of certainty, I don't see how an "average" person can. There is enough volume in the markets for institutions to turn around a pretty big freighter.
If you’re playing with thousands, you’re playing a completely different game than someone playing with billions. You don’t have to strategize about how to exit. You just exit.
If you’re playing with thousands, you’re playing a completely different game than someone playing with billions. You don’t have to strategize about how to exit. You just exit.
Many hedge funds outsource the execution of their trades to HFT, which scales in and out over days.
Google Archegos if you want to see what happens when you liquidate billion dollar positions in a hurry.
I think this is akin to the unintuitive finding that if you randomly chose someone from your friendlist, there is good chance that this person is more popular than almost everyone else. Just being in the friendlist is a positive factor to the capability of making friends.
The vast majority of day traders is not honing their skills and information sharing inside a dedicated Discord group. Especially in crypto, these groups, and not the big Wallstreet hedge funds, are the most sophisticated and skilled at profiting from smaller markets.
> If the smartest institutional traders with the best tools can't figure out the direction of SPY in the short run with any kind of certainty
This is misunderstanding trading. It is all about uncertainty and willing to take risks if EV+ situations arises. Extremely few are figuring out the short run with any kind of certainty, and these few risk being fined or charged with market manipulation. The average person can find profitable coin flips (56% accuracy), which, while far from certain, can be flipped many times. Sometimes such flips are not possible for the bigger smarter institutional traders, because their plays use way more money, and they focus on what they learned over 30 years. Anyone starting in 2010 is able to be more knowledable about crypto trading, than someone with a 50-year trading career (who pays someone a little-less-knowledgable than you, not in-the-know of Discord or Telegram, to write an analysis).
That is an apt analogy, which is why I believe Rentech’s Medallion fund is kept small and has better returns than other larger funds.
You seem very sure about where the market is going in the short term, you should start a hedge fund!
Or course, I'm kidding, internet financial hot takes are a dime a dozen, and generally worthless.
Active trading will is more likely to have larger swings than passive trading.
In the short-run the good times will be better and the bad-times will be worse.
In the long-run, statistically the majority (not all!) that play the game will lose over the long run to passive investors.
None of this is to argue for one of doing things over the other so long as people understand the risks that they're opting into.
1) confirmation bias. Many people have blind faith in the market and while trends are semi-reliable. There are plenty of instances that buck all trends and can take out even the most seasoned day traders accounts if the overrely.
2) a lot of times these are pump and dumb schemes, even by large hedge funds on small companies that are generally overvalued by the time the “opportunity” hits those reading the standard info sources.
So as someone simply managing my own account. A solid strategy is to avoid day trade and only place buys on something you are good to be long on and have faith in. These are big ones like Microsoft or apple or Costco.
I still invest in companies I’m very knowledgeable on but I don’t take risks on nonsense. And worst case I’m long in some stock for a while But I don’t have to monitor it to the minute nor do I have to really coughing up fees for managed funds at a massive scale.
Sure I miss plenty of plays, especially intra-day or intra-week but I also don’t lose anything on those.
If I invested in a fund that's indexed to the S&P 500, and a company doesn't do well and drops out of the index, then the fund will sell that company and buy whatever replaces them.
Ideally, sure, the fund could have known ahead of time and sold before the company dropped out of the S&P 500, but that's trying to time the market, which generally doesn't go well over longer periods of time. It wants to capture gains in the aggregate over long periods of time, not maximize gains. The more individuals and firms try to maximize gains, the more likely they are to get bit over the long term.
The company drops out of the index on poor performance because its market cap goes below some threshold, because active investors short it or sell it when its poor performance makes it overpriced. If every investor is passive, there is no mechanism for the price to reflect the company's underlying finances.
Sure, but that's a big if. We're a long way from 100% anything.
Also, a company can drop out of an index even when it's doing well just because investors are running a short campaign against it, so I would caution against the assumption that all market performance is because of poor company performance.
In general, the trend has been for most active investors to underperform the market, in part because they charge higher fees, but also because successful active investing is very hard to do consistently. People moving away from those active investors and to index funds won't hurt the market because they generally don't do as well as the market.
Now, if people move away from effective active investors, then that could lead to the problems mentioned, but I've never heard of people moving away from effective active investment.
Traders are pretty wired.
People building long term businesses (Like 10 year horizon plus) are on a different gravity.
You are assuming that the stock market is as-good-as-random, and that you can't crowdsource aggregate market sentiment and private information (someone who knows that they will buy the next 5 Tesla cars, so they will contribute to the growth). If you have a 100 of those private information owners, and you aggregate it, you just encoded for brand loyalty. People betting on the GameStop play did so, in part because they were made aware that they were not the only one with nostalgia and hope for GameStop. They did this by pooling their private information.
Finally, if you do assume that clueless pickers are the same as a coinflip, then their noise should cancel out, leading to a very uncertain prediction of 50% (so you turned their non-knowledge into valuable information about the variance/confidence/mindshare penetration/information availability), and then the real experts votes will balance the vote in favor of the most likely prediction (you distilled their expertise).
Taken my counter-example to your spoiler to the extreme: Imagine if all Redditor stock traders gave their honest best guess on if a stock would be down or up next month. The market would become very predictable with that information. Crowdsourcing a subset, just lowers this predictability (but never down to the level of a coin-flip). This crowdsourcing for predictability is precisely the reason the bigger, profitable hedgefunds are crawling Reddit, viewing 16-year old Crypto coin pickers on Youtube, and analyzing retail trades on RobinHood.
Source? If by "random" you mean "randomly pick a company off the stock exchange using a uniform distribution and then buy/sell based on the result of a coin flip", you might be right. However, if your "random" means "randomly picking stocks on a market-cap weighted basis and then holding" (ie. passive investing), I'm going to doubt your claim.
>You are assuming that the stock market is as-good-as-random, and that you can't crowdsource aggregate market sentiment and private information
The problem here is that all that information is public and the amount of alpha is scarce. What I mean by the latter is that if the crowd through its wisdom decides that GME should be $10 higher, and everyone starts buying up shares, it will reach its target price in no time. If the information is kept secret, you might be able to reap all the gains, but since it's public everyone else is trampling over each other trying to get a piece of the action, diluting or even eliminating the benefit for everyone.
>Finally, if you do assume that clueless pickers are the same as a coinflip, then their noise should cancel out, leading to a very uncertain prediction of 50% (so you turned their non-knowledge into valuable information about the variance/confidence/mindshare penetration/information availability), and then the real experts votes will balance the vote in favor of the most likely prediction (you distilled their expertise).
The canceling-out effect only works if they're clueless and are just flipping coins, but doesn't work if they're clueless and are all trying to buy into the same bubble.
>Taken my counter-example to your spoiler to the extreme: Imagine if all Redditor stock traders gave their honest best guess on if a stock would be down or up next month
You do realize that the stock market is exactly that, right? A crowd-sourced prediction engine. Every participant makes their best guess at what the price should be. If they think the price is undervalued they buy shares, pushing the value up. If they think the price is overvalued they do the reverse. Through this mechanism the market collectively obtains the price of a company.
And I think it is enough to claim that the average of the recommendations was better than any individual stock picker.
> The problem here is that all that information is public and the amount of alpha is scarce.
Not insurmountable, no? I feel these objections are often busied by finance professors, after a student rudely assumes they wouldn't be teaching if they knew how to make money.
RenTech was doing speech recognition on foreign TV broadcasts in the 90s. Can't you think of similar features you could whip up in a 100 lines of Python and the YouTube API? Some very profitable companies hire very smart PhDs to that for them. Could you bootstrap this? Work harder? Extend to some new hip platform a well-paid quant has never heard of?
> trying to get a piece of the action, diluting or even eliminating the benefit for everyone.
So join in. You are aware of the action. It's not like we are doing this for a bit of fun. The crowd wisdom is there, the hedge funds don't have a monopoly on polling it or analyzing it. Then redistribute the wealth for the benefit of everyone. Those very hard in on the action are not going to.
> but doesn't work if they're clueless and are all trying to buy into the same bubble.
Yes, this is correct, and a big problem in crowd analytics. Or at least, it has a big negative effect (you ideally want everyone to make decisions of their own accord, using their own information). But you can also again harnass this with counter trading strategies. Over the years, it has been fairly easy to call the top of a hype, and predict the obvious correction. So for instance, if the Teletubbies twitter is tweeting about Bitcoin, you know that maybe now is time to sell some Bitcoin, and rebuy back in 6 months when all newspapers are writing about how Bitcoin is a scam and a world-wide crypto ransom attack just occured.
The problem can be overcome in a couple of ways. An interesting one is: "skin-in-the-game". If your wrong hype predictions damages your reputation or causes money loss, you are more serious about it. Another is to ask: What percentage of other people do you think got this question wrong? People who answer Sydney as the capitol of Australia, think that few got it wrong. People who give the correct answer think that many will get it wrong.
> You do realize that the stock market is exactly that, right?
Partly yes. The difference with crowdsourcing is that you are building a model on top of the other participants. Many day traders with bots do not know that hedge funds have models more complex tracking what they are doing and going to do, than the bot is complex. But many day traders also underestimate how they'd stack up against an office of suits, if they worked together, and ramen-noodle hacked it.
Nope, this is false. Please look up the historical performance of Renaissance Technologies Medallion Fund.
Top 1% own 38% of the value in stocks.
Other winners include tech companies and a space company.
Someone explain to me why I'm an imbecile and why I should have been invested in Vanguard index funds, something I did for decades prior to thjs.
Simple: you got lucky in a bull market.
Let's revisit how you're doing in the next recession or after a couple bad bets.
If you want a deeper answer you'll have to do your own digging, as it's a big topic. But it's worth starting with the efficient markets hypothesis and reading some of the work of Jack Bogle.
There's something strange about the framing of the passive index fund scenario. Over 20-30 years? I'm not interested in beating that benchmark if I'm interested in increasing my net wealth in the next few years. Downvote away, this is my experience and feeling on the topic, not financial advice to others.
This phenomenon has been shown repeatedly in studies of trading behaviour among individual investors (e.g. [1] and [2]), who have been found to collectively destroy wealth for all other investors. Only an absolutely minuscule proportion of traders actually beat the market.
As with any casino, there are winners and losers. But usually the house wins.
[1] https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/odean/papers%20current%20v...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13864...
Stop comparing traders and active funds in your study citations. That's not the benchmark. I'm not a fund (which has its own issues as it has to manage 100s of millions which is different than an account like one of ours), and I'm not a day trader/trader. Buying and holding stocks is hardly a zero sum game. You're confused with day trading and options trading which DOES have two sides of a bet. There's something about humanity that some folks here fail to understand when their noses are in the numbers. Are you trying to sell to me the idea that buying AAPL in the early 2000s was a random pick? I'm done here, all that's happening is I lose points as punishment for questioning orthodoxy.
Index funds are high risk! What if there's a big dip and you find the perfect house?
Bond rates are low and a bit uncertain at the moment. What's your 'cash replacement'?
> active strategies lose out to passive ones in the long run.
It's false if we're talking about specific strategies (e.g. Medallion Fund).
There are computerized short-term strategies that print money almost every single day, deployed in a few of the large firms.
There is a certain rationality to this, when you're coming from so far behind.
If you need a million dollars and you start with $200K, you set a timeline and a prudent plan.
If you need a million dollars and you start with $2K, you're so far behind[0] you may as well gamble.
I do not necessarily advocate the latter. I'm just articulating the thinking/emotion.
[0] 2000 at 7% p.a. takes 92 years to top a million if my arithmetic is correct.
We quickly saw that wasn't really the case.
I believe in the Boglehead philosophy..
Passive investing means doing what your bank advisor suggests. People are starting to realize that those advisors may not make smarter decisions on where the world is going than the people themselves.
Active investing refers to active equity or bond selection and investment with the goal of generating excess alpha (i.e. beating the market)
Buying a traditional, managed mutual fund is a form of active investing.
Passive investing involves buying a large, diversified portfolio of equities and bonds such that you hold a percentage of the whole market. This is "passive" because there's no attempt to select specific stocks. The goal is simply to match the market by owning a portfolio that's representative of the market.
Buying an S&P 500 index fund is a form of passive investing.
Both could be done in consultation with a financial advisor.
I see more of this kind of active investing happening (people reading Tesla blogs and going to meetups as an example, deconstructing software updates to see how the models are being ported 1-by-1 to the new framework. Financial advirsors generally don't do this in depth due diligents for products (or at least I haven't met any).
As an example I read through a part of the Bitcoin source code to see how well it's written before investing in it, and I haven't seen any financial advisor who even looked at its github repo, and they already have opinion on it.
Asset allocation is another active investment decision.
As investors in Robinhood I would imagine they love active investing.
I worked in fund management: I have never seen people who were so overpaid (myself included) for doing so little. Fund managers are a net negative cost to the economy, and they earn fees to do it. Most of them, particularly personal advisors, understand nothing about investing that most people couldn't learn themselves (the only exception are the big wealth management divisions at IBs, most personal advisors likely cost clients substantially). I actually worked in the personal space too, I remember billing clients regularly ~$20k for 20 minutes work...there is no world (even inc. our costs) in which our fees made sense.
I invest actively because I have literally spent 14 hours/day researching stocks for most of the past decade. For anyone else, buy an index fund. Your performance is still going to be good, there is no way that most people get a return on time researching stocks/mutual funds themselves.
VCs have a fetish for financial idiocy that I will never understand (perhaps that is required to be a VC, no idea).
Public is an interesting place where you can see behind the curtain of who the folks using these services actually are and what their logic is. (Trades on Public are visible to everyone by default, and it’s basically a giant message board.)
Five minutes in and you’ll see that 98% of the activity looks a lot more like gambling than anything that might be driven by a plan or strategy. That’s fine and I don’t say that to disparage Public’s users, but it’s important to be realistic about what’s going on here.
I believe Public also encourages/seeds the community with celebrities and “experts” / quasi-influencers who are clearly trying to make a name for themselves on the platform. Some of them share basic advice, while others drive short spurts of mania based on their investment decisions. Watching it all play out has solidified in my mind that active investing is a losing game all around.
The sad thing is I think this is true except that far fewer active trades than hustles make a profit...
"real world skills" is a nebulous concept. What counts as a "real world skill" and what doesn't?
>My gut tells me that finance should be automated by computers without a profit motive because greed rots the soul and our environment.
You mean some sort of planned economy? Those have not worked well historically. Even if you somehow outsource it to an unbiased computer, who sets the weights? What's the relative value of an apple compared to an banana?
Got a sprain? Call a doctor. Leaking pipe? Call a plumber. Doesn't seem nebulous at all. Conversely, speculation and greed ruining the world? Call on the populace to bail them out. Speculation doesn't build or fix physical stuff.
>You mean some sort of planned economy? Those have not worked well historically.
Because historically it has been done on inferior computers. Whereas now we have the computing power to calculate the economy n-times over. Dr. Paul Cockshott on Cybersocialism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtlZys7QOO4. That being said, I'm sceptical as well; the video leaves many things unanswered which he expands on in his books that I have yet to read. However, I welcome any ideas on how to detach humans from having to deal with money, so we can collectively pursue more lofty goals, beyond profit.
Now, we can certainly argue the specifics of the best way to do that, and whether our current system is working as it should, but it isn’t as simple as to say everyone working in finance is useless.
It would be if that's what speculation actually did, but it doesn't. Everything that predominantly boils down to making money with money needs to go.
>but it isn’t as simple as to say everyone working in finance is useless.
Agreed.
But it does. Speculators influence the price up/down depending on their actions. How much they earn is directly based on how correct their predictions are.
Then came an uncomfortable realization. There are multiple indices. Which one should you aim to beat and why? This question stuck with me and I didn't manage to resolve it at the time.
Then I learned about the argument that active investors cannot beat passive investors because on average these two groups will hold the same stocks in the same proportions. The active investors are just trading stock back and forth and incurring fees in the process. This seemed logical and convincing at the time.
A few years later I was trying to think on a theorethical level, how can active investors stand a chance against passive investors, if on average they hold the same things, and the passive investors don't incur fees? What I came up with was this: Stocks enter and exit indices. So even index funds have to do the occasional trade. If active investors as a group buy a stock before it enters an index, they can gain a leg up on the passive investors.
Then I thought of something even worse. A bad actor could "poison" the index by founding companies. Trade a few stocks back and forth with a buddy to establish a high market cap. If it makes it into the index, the index funds have to buy from you.*
Another thing that an index fund has to do is buy and sell when people enter and exit the fund, and when it does it has to trade with active investors. If active investors can predict in/outflows into the index-fund they can beat its cap-weighted**performance.
Recently I've been thinking about the inclusion criteria for the index. This kind of ties in with all of the previous threads I mentioned and unifies them. Every index has a bunch of inclusion criteria, this is completely necessary and inescapable or else the poison problem becomes serious. Whichever index you choose, there will be some good companies inside and some bad companies outside. Thus there is no right index to choose. And here is another opportunity for active investors as a group, trying to beat the inclusion criteria of the index. Avoiding the poison better than the index funds. And picking good companies that didn't make it inside, and of course investments that are outside the index because it's in a different region, or because they are not stock at all.
* This is a simple example. You could imagine a much more sophisticated scheme, with many different actors trading stocks back and forth, and mixing real companies in with the duds.
** An example to help the imagination: An index fund falls in value, almost everyone exit the fund. It recovers, people come back. Even though the fund is +-0, the average investor has lost money.
What’s the economic impact of this behavior though? I want to say it’s generally negative since it’s bound to grossly disrupt proper price discovery but was that even the case before this period of excess leverage? I doubt it.
I think the resurgance of retail stock trading in the last 2 years or so, is not due to the uncertain economy (again, only big players really benefit from market uncertainty), but because there really were few other places to put your money (negative interests rates, high gold prices, impossible real estate market) and the Fed printing money and keeping the market from collapsing, led to a fairly certain economy, where the Fed would garantuee your losses, but you could keep the wins. This top-down manipulation was obvious enough to trickle down to retail investors using RobinHood.
In smaller, emerging, markets, quantitative active trading has become very competitive. Some markets, still profitable to active trading, are now beaten by a "mindless" passive trading strategy. Like stocks, it makes little sense anymore.
Wallstreet bets is a non-regulated pump-and-dump group, in the upper echelons ethically worse than the owners of the biggest hedge funds (who won't take profit on some plays if they know it causes long-term damage to the economy, the economy being a matter of national security). The GameSpot play made a few of those a millionaire, lost the college funds of people too late to jump on the bandwagon, and done damage to the degree of billions, when hedge - and pension funds had to withdraw from solid businesses such as Google and Amazon, to cover the losses from this memetic war. You can also state that the drivers of the bandwagon, were doing a passive strategy spanning years. It is the active trading of the bandwagon that made their strategy worthwhile (and not a poorly-informed play based on nostalgia and potential).
Numerai also is a passive investing (3 weeks+) fund. They are not that different from a hedge fund buying prop data.
I do think the article is interesting, and adds information on a new emerging trend. But it also reads a bit too kind and objective, like a music journalist describing a new album she isn't a particularly personal fan of. Subtleties will be missed, while the overal picture still is objective and correct to the quality.
As an investor myself, both active and passive, I progressed the most when I learned how the game is played at the top level. Active meme traders should do well to investigate these top players, just like these top players are studying them. RobinHood's order book is fed to the top players. They stand to gain by promoting this active retail trend, and taking near-certified profit on top of these predictable low-information emotion-driven masses. Buy things like Tesla or social media technology, which you as a 20-year-old, see using in 10 years. That's the way to beat the 35 year old senior Goldman Sachs analyst.