The January issue of Research magazine is now available on
-line and, with it, my Above the Market column. Here’s a taste of the column.
We all want “high leverage” ideas — the ideas that will make the biggest impact on our portfolios and our lives. But the best ideas available are not still more investment recommendations about hot sectors, hot funds, hot strategies and hot managers. There is no reason to think anybody can do that anyway.
The best ideas I can offer relate to our besetting mistakes, mistakes we make over and over again. My high leverage idea for 2016 and beyond is to get off the merry-go-round of the next new thing and to eliminate obvious mistakes first and foremost. As Charley Ellis famously established, investing is a loser’s game much of the time, with outcomes dominated by luck rather than skill and high transaction costs. Thus if we avoid mistakes we will generally win.
To paraphrase the philosopher Immanuel Kant, the first task of reason is to recognize its limitations. Every rational person acknowledges having made many errors. Even so, nobody offers current examples. We all want to think that our mistakes are in the past, that we’ve learned from them and that now we’ve set things right.
We desperately want to believe that our new approach, new strategy or new portfolio will — finally — be the magic elixir that will make us very good, if not great, investors (or at least that we can find those great investors).
I hope you will read the entire piece and the full issue.
Above the Market 