Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

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jasonfried: You write, "this isn’t a traditional investment. We’re not looking to get out, we’re looking to stay in."

I have to disagree with your choice of words: the investment you guys just made is the truly traditional, old-fashioned kind. Consider what John Maynard Keynes wrote about the difference between the way in which professional investors invest in a business, versus the way in which entrepreneurs since time immemorial have committed capital to business endeavors. Most professional investors, Keynes wrote:

  are, in fact, largely concerned, not with making superior long-term forecasts
  of the probable yield of an investment over its whole life, but with foreseeing
  changes in the conventional basis of valuation a short time ahead of the
  general public. They are concerned, not with what an investment is really worth
  to a man who buys it "for keeps," but with what the market will value it at,
  under the influence of mass psychology, three months or a year hence.[1]

Before the advent of financial markets, all investments were made "for keeps" by people looking to "stay in."

Congratulations on making a traditional investment.

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PS. FWIW, Keynes accumulated a fortune by investing his own capital during his lifetime.

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[1] http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300071h/printall.html

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Edits: added more context and clarified my key point.

> PS. FWIW, Keynes accumulated a fortune by investing his own capital during his lifetime.

And FWIW: He also lost a fortune by investing in his own lifetime. (He was nearly wiped out in the 1929 crash, which he failed to foresee.)

+1

The Super Myth of Keynes as a Great Stock Market Investor: http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2012/03/super-myth-of-k...

He was 83% long going into the downturn that resulted in the 1929 crash (p. 21)So how could Keynes be a great investor with such a bad performance? Because Keynes, the evil bastard, along with Bernard Baruch, talked FDR into confiscating the gold owned by all Americans. He then loaded up his portfolio with gold mining stocks and then urged FDR to prop up the price of gold.

...

Bottom line, as far as I'm concerned, Keynes was a terrible investor, as shown by his pre-gold mining stock losses. The only time he made real money in the markets was when he traded on inside information about FDR's plan to drive the gold price up, and loaded up on gold mining stocks. Got that? The man who called gold a "barbarous relic" in his 1924 book, Monetary Reform, had 66% of his portfolio in gold mining stocks in the 1930s.

jpdoctor: what are your sources?

I ask only because according to the reputable sources I've read, Keynes made a fortune from his investments, and he also made a lot of money for Cambridge University, whose portfolio he managed for a few decades. Here's some reliable information on his track record as an investor:

* The Economist: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/06/keynesia...

* The Financial Times: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/31f0e3f8-eaba-11e1-984b-00144...

* University of Cambridge/London School of Economics: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2023011

I'd also recommend Lord Skidelsky's excellent book on Keynes.

Previous personal research, mainly. However, a quick check through the LSE paper you linked: However, performance in the late 1920s was disappointing, as we saw in the previous section. His 83% equity allocation at the end of August 1929 indicates that he failed to foresee the imminent sharp fall in the London market. This sobering experience could well have led Keynes to his beauty contest metaphor and to bemoan the seeming inability of the “serious-minded” investor, frustrated by the “game-players”, “to purchase investments on the best genuine long-term expectations he can frame” (Keynes, 1936: 156).

I'd be surprised if the other sources failed to acknowledge that he busted badly in 1929-31.

jpdoctor: it makes no sense to judge his long-term results based on a short stretch of under-performance. According to that same paper, the portfolio he managed for Cambridge University beat the market by 8%/year on average from the early 1920's until his death in 1946. That period includes the Great Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930's!

PS. That would be like judging Warren Buffett's impressive long-term investment record based on the sharp decline in Berkshire Hathaway's share price during the financial panic of 2008!

PPS. If you think Buffett's record is explained by luck, check out the subsequent long-term record of the seven investors identified in this article he wrote for Columbia Business School's magazine in 1984: http://www4.gsb.columbia.edu/null?&exclusive=filemgr.dow... -- all materially outperformed the major stock indices after being identified by Buffett -- what are the odds of that?

> it makes no sense to judge his long-term results based on a short stretch of under-performance.

It makes enormous sense: He missed the biggest economic event of three generations. If you can't call the big ones, then there's very little proof his returns were something other than luck.

Look, both Keynes and Buffett (since you mentioned him) have long term positive results when there was a long term positive market. Choose a high-beta portfolio in such an environment, and voila! you beat the market. In order to show you have any actual insight and aren't just playing for luck, you need to show that you beat the market significantly in both up and down environments.

BTW, the entire mutual fund market is based on this approach, and when a fund seriously underperforms, it is conveniently removed from the portfolio of Fidelity/Janus/insert hucksters here.

Edit: Relevant http://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-dont-understand-i...

Most people out there don't understand the inverse relationship of bond prices and yields, let alone beta.

Fair point. I'm glad you knew what I actually meant ;)

I've updated the post to reflect more of what I meant. This isn't the type of tech investment you normally read about.

Thanks for doing that, and thanks for writing the post. We need more people thinking this way, sincerely trying to build businesses and organizations of lasting value :-)

I don't see how Keynes' description contradicts Jason's notion of traditional investing.

pilsetnieks: before financial markets made it possible for people to exit their investments with relative ease, all investments throughout history were made "for keeps" by people looking to "stay in" essentially forever. The idea of "investing temporarily" (which almost qualifies as an oxymoron in my view) is a more recent development, but has become dominant to the point that it is now considered "traditional."

Oh, ok. Before the clarification it just seemed that you used the Keynes' quote as a description of traditional professional investing.

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