Are You Making These 6 Market Timing Mistakes?

Posted On September 10, 2017 By Scott Stratton, CFP(R), CFA In Behavioral Finance, Portfolio Management / 1 Comment

Market timing means moving in and out of the market or between assets based on a prediction of what the market will do. Given the extreme difficulty of predicting the future, market timing is frowned upon by most academics. Many studies have shown that the majority of investors who time the market under-perform those who stay invested.

Even though many people know intellectually that market timing is detrimental, it is actually pretty difficult to stay invested and not be influenced by market timing. Even for those who say they don’t time the market, there are a number of ways that investors inadvertently fall into this trap.

1. Being in Cash. “We are going to sit on X% in cash and wait for a buying opportunity.” Seems prudent, right? Except that investors who have been holding out for a 10% or 20% crash for two, three, four years or more have missed out on a huge move up in the market. Yes, there are rational reasons to say that the market is expensive today, but those who have been sitting in cash have definitely under-performed. Will they eventually be proved right? The market certainly has cycles of growth and contraction. This is normal and healthy. So, yes, there will be another bear market. The problem is that trying to predict when this will occur usually makes returns worse rather than better.

2. Greed and Fear. The human inclination is to want to invest when the market has done well and to sell when the market is in the doldrums. I remember investors who insisted in going to cash in November 2008 and March 2009, right at the bottom. In 1999, people were borrowing money to put into tech funds, which had given them returns of 30%, 50%, even 100% in a year. Our natural reaction is to buy high and sell low, the opposite of what we should be doing. It’s only in hindsight that we recognize these trades as mistakes.

3. Performance Chasing. Investors like to switch from Fund A to Fund B when Fund A does better. Who wouldn’t want to be in the better fund? This is why people give up on index funds. Index funds often only beat half of their peers in any given year, so it’s super easy to find a fund that is doing better. However, when we go to a five-year horizon, index funds are winning 80-90% of the time. That’s why switching to a fund with a better recent track record is often a mistake. (And then watch the fund you just sold soar…)

4. Sector and Country funds. Investors want to buy a sector or country fund when it is a standout. This is market timing! You are buying what is hot (expensive) rather than buying what is on sale. I have yet to have any client ever come to me and say “sector X is doing terrible, should we buy?”. Instead, some will ask me about biotech, or India, or some other high flyer. I remember when the ING Russia fund had the best 10-year track record of all mutual funds. If you bought it then, I think you would have regretted it immensely in the following years! When people buy sector or country funds, the decision is almost always a market timing error of extrapolating recent performance into the future, instead of recognizing that today’s leaders become tomorrow’s laggards.

5. Factor Investing. If you haven’t heard of Factor Funds, you will soon! Quantitative analysts look for a set of criteria which they can feed into a computer and it picks the best performing stocks. How do they come up with a winning formula? By back-testing strategies using historical stock prices. This sounds very scientific, and I admit that it looks promising, but there are still some market timing landmines for investors, including:

Historical anomalies. It’s possible that a strategy that worked great over the past 10 years might be a dud over the next 10. It is unknown which factors will perform best going forward and it seems naive to assume that the future will be the same as the past.
Choosing which factor. Low Volatility? Value? Momentum? Quality? Those all sound like good things. There are now so many flavors of factors, you have to have an opinion on the market in order to pick which factor will outperform. And that’s right back to market timing: investing based on your prediction of what the market will do. This isn’t Lake Woebegone, where all the factors are above average. Some factors are bound to do poorly for longer than you are likely to be willing to hold them.
Investor switching. In most single years, a factor does not have very exciting performance. I predict that many investors are going to buy a factor fund, and then switch when they see another factor outperform for a year or two. If you’re really going to buy into the factor philosophy, you need to buy and hold for many, many years. Even in back tests, there are quite a few years of under-performance. It was only over long time periods that factors were able to deliver improved returns.

6. Product development. Asset managers are paid on the assets they manage. It’s a business. They will always be coming out with a new, better product to attract new investors. You are being marketed to every day by companies who want your investment dollar. Many new funds will not survive the test of time and will disappear into financial history. Their poor track records will be erased from Morningstar, which is why we have “survivorship bias”, the fact that we only see the track records of the funds that survive. Please use caution when investing in a new fund. Is this new fund vital to your success as an investor or just a marketing ploy for a company to capitalize on the most recent fad?

At Good Life Wealth Management, we are fans of the tried and true and skeptical when it comes to the “new and improved”. We aim to avoid market timing errors by remaining invested and not trying to predict the future path of the market. We avoid emotional investing decisions, performance chasing, and sector/country funds. For the time being, we are watching factor funds with curiosity but a wait and see attitude.

How then do we choose investments and their weight in our asset allocation? Our tactical models are based on the valuation of each category. This is by its nature contrarian – when large cap becomes expensive, it becomes smaller in our portfolios. When small cap becomes cheap, its weighting is increased. We don’t predict whether those categories will go up or down in the near future, but only tilt towards the areas of better relative value. This is based on reversion to the mean and the unwavering belief that diversification remains our best defense.

If you’d like to talk about your portfolio, I’d welcome the chance to sit down and share our approach and philosophy. What keeps us from the Siren song of market timing is our belief in a disciplined and patient investment strategy.

Bye Bye High Yield Bonds

Posted On August 13, 2017 By Scott Stratton, CFP(R), CFA In Portfolio Management / 1 Comment

We’re making a trade in our portfolio models this week and will be selling our high yield bond fund (SPDR Short-Term High Yield ETF, ticker SJNK). The last 18 months have been excellent for high yield bonds; so excellent, in fact, that at this point the now lower yields don’t justify the risks. For those who might be interested in our process behind this decision, please read on.

High Yield, or “Junk”, Bonds are highly cyclical and go through wide swings up and down. They have much higher volatility than other types of bonds, and in spite of their higher yields, have the potential for negative returns to a greater degree than most other types of bonds. Additionally, they have a fairly strong correlation to equities, meaning that when stock markets plunge, high yield bonds – which are issued by lower quality companies – are also likely to drop in value. In times of recession, several percent of high yield issuers will default on their bonds and go bankrupt each year.

How can we determine if high yield bonds are a good value? One of then most common ways is through Credit Spreads. A Credit Spread is the additional amount of yield a high yield bond will provide over a safe bond like a US Treasury.

As recently as January 2016, high yield bonds were paying 6-7 percent over Treasuries. Today, that spread has shrunk into the 3% range, a level which is closer to the lows of the past 20 years. You can see a chart of US Credit Spreads on the website of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Investors today are not being sufficiently compensated for taking the extra risk of high yield bonds, and given the headwinds of higher interest rates and a late-inning stock market, we believe it is time to remove the high yield position from our portfolio. They’ve done their job. While no one can predict if or when these bonds will have their next downturn, we’d rather make the change now.

This is a small trade in most portfolios; our 60/40 model, for example, has only a 4% position in high yield. The proceeds will be reinvested into other bond funds which have lower volatility and also a short duration.

In the future, if yield spreads widen, we might buy back into high yield bonds. When pessimism is at its highest, low prices on high yield bonds can be a great value for patient investors. And that’s the time to be a buyer, not today. Credit spreads are a unique consideration for high yield bonds, but know that we look at each category within our portfolio models closely and will not hesitate to make adjustments after cautious and deliberate study.

If you have any questions about high yield bonds, fixed income, or any other aspect of portfolio construction, please give me a call!

Mid-Year Report: The Return of Irrational Exuberance?

Posted On July 2, 2017 By Scott Stratton, CFP(R), CFA In Portfolio Management /

We’ve passed the mid-year point and the market has had a strong performance in the first half of 2017. Investors should be very pleased with the results of the past six months, although I believe there are reasons to be guarded going forward. Our portfolio models all notched positive returns, but our value oriented approach held back returns relative to our benchmarks.

Looking first at stocks, our global equity benchmark, the MSCI All Country World Index (iShares ticker ACWI) produced a total return of 11.92%. That would be a great return for the whole year, and it’s only July 1 as I write this. US Stocks, such as the Russell 1000 Index (iShares ticker IWB) were up 9.15% in the first half.

Across the board, international stocks were well ahead of US Stocks, with both Developed and Emerging Markets producing 15% returns for the first half. Our International and Emerging small caps did even better, over 17%. Our positions in foreign equities were strong contributors to our portfolio returns. If you are just investing in domestic stocks, you really missed out so far in 2017. And International stocks remain less expensive than US stocks by most measures.

Our holdings in US Value stocks lagged, gaining only 2-4% versus the 9% of the overall market. Last year, Value outperformed both Growth and Core by a wide margin. For 2017, a handful of technology companies are dominating returns, specifically the so-called FAANG stocks: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (now called Alphabet).

While these companies continue to post exciting growth, the price of these stocks is now incomprehensible to me. It feels like 1999 all over again, when there was no price too high for growing tech leaders. While I think that today’s top stocks are bonafide companies with genuine earnings, I still can’t justify the price of the shares.

It smells like a bubble to me, although limited to this small number of stocks. Now that doesn’t mean that we are necessarily on the verge of a collapse. Indices could continue to go higher from here, and even if a few high flyers do get clipped, that doesn’t mean that the rest of the economy will be in trouble.

Our investment process favors patience. We focus our portfolios towards the cheaper segments of the market which have lagged. We look for reversion to the mean, investing as contrarians, rather than chasing momentum. Our value funds and REIT ETF had positive returns, but were detractors from performance, as was our allocation to Alternatives. However, I remain committed to these positions because they are relatively cheap. While they did not beat the market over the past 6 months, our rationale for holding them has only grown more compelling.

In fixed income, the US Aggregate Bond Index (iShares ticker AGG) was up 2.40% year to date. Our fixed income allocations were ahead of AGG by 30 to 80 bps, with higher yields and lower duration. Our position in Emerging Market bonds was a standout performer for the half. I continue to keep a close watch on high yield bonds, but overall think we are well positioned for today’s economy and potential future rate hikes.

I write about the markets twice a year, and not more frequently, to not distract us from sticking to a long-term allocation. We focus on what we know works over time: diversification, keeping costs low, using index funds for core positions, and tilting towards value. Our discipline means that we don’t let short-term events pull us away from our strategy.

Looking at the first half, our fixed income and international equity holdings did quite well. Our value and alternatives holdings have not yet had their day in the sun. However, if the market does eventually realize that the US tech stocks have gotten “irrationally exuberant”, I think we will be glad we have our more defensive positions.

What Are Today’s Projected Returns?

Posted On June 18, 2017 By Scott Stratton, CFP(R), CFA In Financial Planning, Portfolio Management /

One of the reasons I selected the financial planning software we use, MoneyGuidePro, is because it offers the ability to make projections based on historical OR projected returns. Most programs only use historical returns in their calculations, which I think is a grave error today. Historical returns were outstanding, but I fear that portfolio returns going forward will be lower for several reasons, including:

Above-average equity valuations today. Lower dividend yields than in the past.
Slower growth of GDP, labor supply, inflation, and other measures of economic development.
Higher levels of government debt in developed economies will crowd out spending.
Very low interest rates on bonds and cash mean lower returns from those segments.

By using projected returns, we are considering these factors in our financial plans. While no one has a crystal ball to predict the future, we can at least use all available information to try to make a smarter estimate. The projected returns used by MoneyGuidePro were calculated by Harold Evensky, a highly respected financial planner and faculty member at Texas Tech University.

We are going to compare historical and projected returns by asset class and then look at what those differences mean for portfolio returns. Keep in mind that projected returns are still long-term estimates, and not a belief of what will happen in 2017 or any given year. Rather, projected returns are a calculation of average returns that we think might occur over a period of very many years.

Asset Class	Historical Returns	Projected Returns
Cash	4.84%	2.50%
Intermediate Bonds	7.25%	3.50%
Large Cap Value	10.12%	7.20%
Small Cap	12.58%	7.70%
International	9.27%	8.00%
Emerging Markets	8.85%	9.30%

You will notice that most of the expected returns are much lower than historical, with the sole exception of Emerging Markets. For cash and bonds, the projected returns are about half of what was achieved since 1970, and even that reduced cash return of 2.50% is not possible as of 2017.

In order to estimate portfolio returns, we want two other pieces of data: the standard deviation of each asset class (its volatility) and the correlation between each asset class. In those areas, we are seeing that the trend of recent decades has been worse for portfolio construction: volatility is projected to be higher and assets are more correlated. It used to be that International Stocks behaved differently that US Stocks, but in today’s global economy, that difference is shrinking.

This means that our projected portfolios not only have lower returns, but also higher volatility, and that diversification is less beneficial as a defense than it used to be. Let’s consider the historical returns and risks of two portfolios, a Balanced Allocation (54% equities, 46% fixed income), and a Total Return Allocation (72% equities, 28% fixed income)

Portfolio	Historical Return	Standard Deviation	Projected Return	Standard Deviation
Balanced	8.53%	9.34%	5.46%	10.59%
Total Return	9.18%	12.20%	6.27%	14.23%

That’s pretty sobering. If you are planning for a 30-year retirement under the assumption that you will achieve historical returns, but only obtain these projected returns, it is certainly going to have a big impact on your ability to meet your retirement withdrawal needs. This calculation is something we don’t want to get wrong and figure out 10 years into retirement that we have been spending too much and are now projected to run out of money.

As an investor, what can you do in light of lower projected returns? Here are five thoughts:

Use projected returns rather than historical if you want to be conservative in your retirement planning.
Emerging Markets are cheap today and are projected to have the highest total returns going forward. We feel strongly that they belong in a diversified portfolio.
We can invest in bonds for stability, but bonds will not provide the level of return going forward that they achieved in recent decades. It is very unrealistic to assume historical returns for bond holdings today!
Investors focused on long-term growth may want more equities than they needed in the past.
Although projected returns are lower than historical, there may be one bright spot. Inflation is also quite low today. So, achieving a 6% return while inflation is 2% is roughly comparable in preserving your purchasing power as getting an 8% return under 4% inflation. Inflation adjusted returns are called Real Returns, and may not be as dire as the projected returns suggest.

Does Rebalancing Improve Returns?

Posted On April 22, 2017 By Scott Stratton, CFP(R), CFA In Portfolio Management /

Like flossing, we’re told that we need to rebalance because it’s good for us. But does rebalancing improve returns? Like many financial questions, the unsatisfying answer is “it depends”. Today we are going to take a deeper dive into rebalancing, when it works, when it doesn’t, and why it is still a good idea.

You might choose a 60/40 allocation (60% stocks, 40% bonds) because that portfolio has certain risk and return characteristics which fit your needs. Over time, as the market moves, your portfolio is likely to diverge from its original allocation; rebalancing is placing the trades to restore your original 60/40 allocation.

If we assume that stocks grow at 8% and bonds at 3%, what would happen if you did not rebalance? With a higher return, the stocks would become a bigger portion of the portfolio. In fact, after 30 years, your allocation would have shifted from 60/40 to 86/14. It should be noted right at the outset that under the straight-line assumption of stocks outperforming bonds, your performance would be higher by never rebalancing. Selling stocks to maintain a 40% weighting in bonds would slow your growth.

However, if you wanted an aggressive portfolio, you wouldn’t have started with a 60/40 allocation. We should recognize from the outset that the primary goal of rebalancing is not to enhance returns but to maintain a target allocation.

But since the stock market does not move in a straight line and give us exactly 8% returns every year, rebalancing may have a benefit in taking advantage of temporary price disruptions. If the the market tumbles, rebalancing will buy stocks at those low prices. And when the market runs up and is high, rebalancing can sell overvalued stocks and add to the safety of bonds.

What is key to rebalancing, but poorly understood by investors, is that the frequency of rebalancing is a crucial consideration. There’s not just one way to rebalance. Let’s consider a couple of scenarios.

1) In a trending market, where stocks move in one direction for a long time, the more frequently you rebalance, the worse return you create.

For example, let’s imagine a Bull Market where stocks grow by 10% each quarter, and bonds only gain 0.75% per quarter. If you started with $100,000 in a 60/40 portfolio, and did nothing, you would have $129,059 at the end of one year. But if you rebalanced each quarter, your return would be $127,682. Here, rebalancing quarterly would have reduced your returns by $1,376.

But you thought rebalancing was supposed to enhance returns? When a market trend continues for a long period, you would be better off sticking with the trend, rather than rebalancing against the trend.

2) Interestingly, rebalancing also makes returns worse in prolonged bear markets, too.

Same situation: 60/40 portfolio with $100,000. Now let’s imagine a one-year Bear Market where stocks fall by 10% per quarter and bonds gain 0.75% per quarter. Without rebalancing, your portfolio would fall from $100,000 to $80.579. If you rebalanced each quarter, you would have made things even worse, with a drop from $100,000 to $79,076. Rebalancing would have extended your losses by $1,503, or 1.87%.

By rebalancing in a prolonged Bear Market, you were adding to stocks, even as they continued to lose value.

3) While rebalancing hurts returns in directional markets, it can improve returns in markets which are fluctuating. In this third example (still $100,000 in a 60/40 allocation), we assume that bonds return 0.75% per quarter, but that stocks go down 10%, then up 10%, then down 10% and then up 10%.

After one year, with no rebalancing, you’d have $100,019. If you rebalanced quarterly, you would have $100,482. That’s a nice difference in a basically flat market. While rebalancing hurts returns if there is a steady trend, it can improve returns when markets vacillate between positive and negative periods.

So what do we do? Not rebalancing (ever) is not a good choice because you will diverge from your risk preferences. We try to strike a balance in our rebalance frequency by doing it only once a year, and only when a position deviates by more than 5% from target levels.

By rebalancing annually, we allow for longer trends, since Bull or Bear markets can certainly last for at least 12 months. So if you see other firms that brag about rebalancing monthly or quarterly, please understand that more frequent rebalancing is not necessarily better or any guarantee that it will increase returns. As we have shown, there are reasons why more frequent rebalancing could actually make things worse in a Bear Market, which is right when you would want the most defense.

Additionally, we need to consider the costs of rebalancing. Besides transaction costs, in a taxable account, short-term gains are taxed as ordinary income. We hold our positions for at least 12 months before rebalancing to get preferential long-term rates. More frequent rebalancing could be creating an unnecessary tax bill.

With extremely low yields today, it may make sense for some young, aggressive investors to consider being 100% in stocks. Then rather than focusing on rebalancing, you can take advantage of market drops by dollar cost averaging with new purchases. However, even in a 100% stock portfolio, you still have target weights in categories such as Large Cap, Small Cap, International, Emerging Markets, Real Estate, etc. And often it still makes sense to rebalance when one of those categories has a large move up or down.

Once you have accumulated some wealth, whether that is $300,000 or $3 million, you really have to think about how you would feel if the market fell by 50%. From a behavioral perspective, having a target allocation and a rebalancing process means that you have created a framework, a discipline, for how you will respond to the inevitable Bull and Bear market cycles. And the process of rebalancing – to buy low and sell high – is definitely preferable to our innate response, which is often to buy when there is euphoria and to throw in the towel when the market plunges.

Hopefully, you now understand that rebalancing is not a guarantee to enhance returns. In fluctuating markets, it can help you buy low and sell high. But in long-trending markets, the more frequently you rebalance, the more you will reduce your returns, whether it is a Bull Market or a Bear Market. So we can’t blindly just say that rebalancing is good, we have to use it intelligently.

TIPS: Not Attractive Yet

Posted On April 10, 2017 By Scott Stratton, CFP(R), CFA In Portfolio Management /

I love TIPS, but I’m going to tell you why you should not own them today. Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) are government bonds, backed by the US Treasury. They pay two ways: a fixed interest rate (coupon) paid every six months, and an adjustment to your principal based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI-U). The dollar amount of interest increases when CPI goes up.

TIPS are considered by many to be a nearly “ideal” investment. Most traditional bonds have a set face value of $1,000, which creates inflation risk. The $1,000 you will get back 10 years from now will not have the same purchasing power as $1,000 does today. This inflation risk is nullified by TIPS. And it doesn’t even matter what inflation is: whether it is 1% or 10%, your purchasing power will be preserved by TIPS. It’s a remarkable benefit which makes TIPS “safer” at preserving wealth than a CD or savings account, while carrying none of the market risk of stocks.

At my previous firm, we had tens of millions of dollars invested in TIPS as a core fixed income holding. At my urging, we sold almost all of these bonds between 2012 and 2013. Why? As interest rates fell, the prices of TIPS skyrocketed. Yields on TIPS became negative; investors were willing to pay so much for these bonds that they were guaranteed to not keep up with inflation. Our clients had made a handsome profit in TIPS, but would have made less than inflation if we continued to hold. So we sold the TIPS and moved into other types of bonds.

The yield on TIPS are determined by auction, and the Treasury presently issues 5-year, 10-year, and 30-year TIPS. Institutional investors compare TIPS yield to fixed rate Treasury Bonds. For example, the most recent 10-Year TIPS auction on March 31, 2017 produced a yield of 0.466% (plus inflation). Compared this to the current yield on a fixed 10-Year note of about 2.3% and you get an inflation expectation of 1.8% over the next 10 years.

For big banks, this creates arbitrage opportunities if they think that the market inflation expectations are wrong. This arbitrage mechanism means that the rate on TIPS will likely be tied closely to regular Treasury Interest Rates.

For investors, if you think that we were going to have extreme inflation over the next 10 years, you would prefer to invest in the TIPS rather than the 2.3% fixed rate 10-Year note. But that is speculation, and I am not interested in speculating on inflation rates, thinking that we know more than all of Wall Street.

However, the forces which drove down interest rates and gave us a reason to sell our TIPS at high prices appear to be reversing. The Federal Reserve has started to raise interest rates, which may mean that last summer’s 1.6% 10-Year yield was the top of a 30-year bond Bull Market. As interest rates rise, the price of existing bonds will drop. And that will be painful for holders of 10 year and especially 30 year bonds, including TIPS.

Back when you could buy TIPS and earn 2%, 3% or more above inflation, that was a compelling return for a very low risk bond. Today, the yields on TIPS are less than 0.5% on the 5 and 10 year TIPS and below 1% on the 30 year TIPS. In 2 of the 3 auctions in 2016, the yields on the 5-year TIPS were negative. These rates are simply too low to include in our portfolios. Add in the risk of rising interest rates (= falling bond prices), and the appeal of 10 and 30 year TIPS are gone for me.

There is an alternative to TIPS which do not carry the risk of rising rates: I-Series Savings Bonds. Like TIPS, I-Bonds are linked to CPI-U and also carry a fixed rate of return. You purchase and redeem I-Bonds through TreasuryDirect.gov. They are issued as 30-year bonds, but you can redeem them anytime after 1 year (3 months interest penalty if redeemed in the first 5 years). Since you can redeem them directly with the government, you don’t have to worry about market losses caused by rising interest rates. If there are better alternatives in 5 years, you could simply cash out your I-Bonds and take your money elsewhere.

I-Bonds would be a logical alternative to TIPS, except for two big problems: 1) The current fixed rate is zero. Since 2010, it has been zero for most of the time, briefly reaching only 0.10% or 0.20%. 2) Each taxpayer is limited to buying $10,000 of I-Bonds a year and you cannot own them in an IRA or brokerage account. Still, if the fixed rate on I-Bonds were the same as TIPS, I would buy those first, before buying any TIPS.

There may come a time when it will be attractive to buy I-Bonds or TIPS. For now, interest rates are too low and inflation is not an immediate risk. Still, there are many appealing benefits to these bonds. While preserving purchasing power is the primary difference to other bonds, from a portfolio construction standpoint, there are other benefits, including extremely low default risk, relatively low volatility, and much lower correlation to equities than corporate bonds.

Today, I think we can get a higher return by taking on some credit risk versus government bonds, whose interest rates have been held down by central banks. It has been nearly 10 years now since the peak of the mortgage/financial crisis, but we are just now starting to emerge from a global Zero Interest Rate Policy. That unwinding will take many years and will have a big impact on fixed income for years to come.

10 Ways to Wreck Your Portfolio

Posted On March 19, 2017 By Scott Stratton, CFP(R), CFA In Behavioral Finance, Portfolio Management /

Over the years, I’ve seen hundreds of portfolios and 401(k) accounts, and observed investors make tons of mistakes. Admittedly, I have made many of these errors on my own as well, just to double check! Here’s your chance to learn from others’ losses. But, if you still insist that you want to ruin your rate of return, go ahead and make these 10 mistakes…

1) Rely on Past Performance. You invest with winners, not losers! Just find the top performing fund offered by your 401(k) and put all your money in there. That’s why they say past performance is a guarantee of future returns, or something like that.

2) Don’t diversify. Have you seen that Chinese Small-Cap BioTech fund? Why invest in the whole market when you can bet on one tiny, minuscule sliver?

3) Ignore the fact that 80% of actively managed funds under perform their benchmark over five years. You’re going to pick funds from the other 20%. Indexing is for people who are willing to settle for average.

4) Put as much money as possible into your company stock. It’s beat the S&P 500 for X number of years, therefore you’d be stupid to ever take your money out of company stock or to cash in your options. And since you work there, you know more about this investment than anyone. Just like the employees at Nortel, Worldcom, and Enron.

5) To avoid paying taxes, don’t sell your winners. Don’t rebalance or sell overvalued shares. Later, if the stock is down 40% you can pat yourself on the back: “Thank God I didn’t sell when it was up and have to pay 15% tax on my gains. I dodged that bullet!”

6) Never sell your losers either. The loss isn’t real until you sell, and the most important thing is to protect your ego. If you hold on, eventually, you should get your money back. So what if another fund returns 60% while you are waiting for yours to rebound 30%? (Says the guy who has old General Motors shares that are worthless from when the company filed for bankruptcy and wiped out their stockholders.)

7) Do it yourself. Don’t use funds or ETFs, pick individual stocks yourself! It will be fun and easy. Just look at all those smiling people on the commercials for online brokers, they’re getting rich from their kitchen tables! Anyone can beat those fancy investment managers with their extensive training, huge research departments, and decades of experience. And if you spend all day watching your portfolio, it magically grows faster!

8) You know when to get in and out of the market. It’s not market timing if you know what you’re doing. When the market is down, it’s a bad market, so don’t buy then. Wait until the market goes back up before you make your purchases. You should toss out a detailed 20-year financial plan if your gut tells you. And by gut, of course, we mean CNBC, Fox News, or whatever you watched in the preceding 48 hours.

9) When the market is down, your funds are horrible, the managers incompetent, and the market is rigged. When your portfolio is up, it’s because of your brilliant mind for finance. You are investing for decades, but if your portfolio doesn’t go up every single quarter something is horribly wrong with your approach. Change everything you own when this happens.

10) All the good investments are reserved for the wealthy. You can only become rich by investing in complicated, non-transparent private placements or limited partnerships in oil, real estate, leasing, or something you cannot explain in less than three minutes. And it’s rude to ask how much these programs charge, that’s so gauche. On a related note, you should always buy penny stocks that you hear about through an email.

I know no one really wants to wreck their portfolio, but from my vantage point, a lot of our investment pains appear self-inflicted. I can help you avoid these ten mistakes and many, many others. Even more important than avoiding errors, together we can create a financial plan and investment program that will be tailored to your goals, rather than focusing on what the market might do this month or this year.

Professional advice. Comprehensive financial planning. Evidence-based investment management. Ongoing evaluation, monitoring, and adjustment. Those are our tools to help investors succeed. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be years when the market is down, but it does mean we will be better prepared and much less likely to make the mistakes which can make things worse.

Do Top Performing Funds Persist?

Posted On February 27, 2017 By Scott Stratton, CFP(R), CFA In Portfolio Management /

How do you pick the funds for your 401(k)? I know a lot of people will look at the most recent performance chart and put their money into the funds with the best recent returns. After all, you’d want to be in the top funds, not the worst funds, right? You’d want to invest with the managers who have the most skill, based on their results.

We’ve all heard that “past performance is no guarantee of future results”, and yet our behavior often suggests that we actually believe the opposite: if a fund has out-performed for 1, 3, or 5 years, we believe it is due to manager skill and the fund is indeed more likely to continue to out-perform than other funds.

But is that true? Do better performing funds continue to stay at the top? We know the answer to this question, thanks to the people at S&P Dow Jones Indices, who twice a year publish their Persistence Scorecard (link).

Looking at the entire universe of actively managed mutual funds, they rank fund performance by quartiles, with the 1st quartile being the top performing 25% of funds, and the 4th quartile being the bottom 25% of funds.

Let’s consider the “Five Year Transition Matrix”, which ranks funds over five years and then follows how they perform in the subsequent five year period. For the most recent Persistence Scorecard, published in December 2016, this looks at funds’ five-year performance in September 2011, and then how they ranked five years later in September 2016.

Here’s how the top quartile of all domestic funds fared in the subsequent 5-year period:
20.09% remained in the top quartile
18.93% fell to the second quartile
20.56% fell to the third quartile
27.80% fell to the bottom quartile
10.75% were merged or liquidated, and did not exist five years later

The sad thing is that if you picked a fund in the top quartile, there was only a 20% chance that your fund remained in the top quartile for the next five years. But there was a more than 38% chance that your top performing fund became a worst performing fund or was shut down completely in the next five years.

Another interesting statistic: the percentage of large cap funds that stayed in the top half for five years in a row was 4.47%. If you simply did a coin flip, you’d expect this number to be 6.25%. The number of funds that stayed in the top half is slightly worse than random.

The Persistence Scorecard is a pretty big blow to the notion of picking a fund based on its past performance. And it’s significant evidence that we should not be making investment choices based on Morningstar ratings or advertisements touting funds which were top performers.

Should you do the opposite? I wish it was as simple as buying the bottom-performing funds, but they don’t fare any better. Funds in the bottom quartile had a similarly random distribution into the other three quartiles, but had a much higher chance of being merged or liquidated.

There are a couple of possible explanations for funds’ lack of persistence:

Styles can go out of favor; a “value” manager may out-perform in one period and not the following period. Hence a seemingly perpetual rotation of leaders.
Successful managers may attract large amounts of capital, making them less agile and less likely to out-perform.
There may be more randomness and luck to managers’ returns, rather than skill, than they would like to have us believe.

Unfortunately, the S&P data shows that for whatever reason, there is little evidence for persistence. Investors need a more sophisticated investment approach than picking the funds which had the best performance. The Persistence Scorecard highlights why performance chasing doesn’t work for investors: yesterday’s winners are often tomorrow’s losers.

What to do then? We focus on creating a target asset allocation, using a core of low-cost, tax efficient index ETFs and a satellite component of assets with attractive fundamentals. What we don’t do is change funds every year because another fund performed better than ours. That kind of activity has the potential for being highly damaging to your long-term returns.

I hope you will take the time to read the Persistence Scorecard. It will give you actual data to understand better why we say past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Diversification and Regret

Posted On February 6, 2017 By Scott Stratton, CFP(R), CFA In Behavioral Finance, Portfolio Management / 1 Comment

Diversification is one of the key principles of portfolio management. It can reduce idiosyncratic risks of individual stocks or sectors and can give a smoother performance trajectory, or as financial analysts prefer to say, a “superior risk-adjusted return” over time. Everyone sees the wisdom of not putting all your eggs in one basket, but the reality is that diversification can sometimes be frustrating, too.

Being diversified means holding many different types of investments: stocks and bonds, domestic and international stocks, large cap and small cap, traditional and alternative assets. Not all of those assets are going to perform well at the same time. This leads to a behavioral phenomenon called Tracking Error Regret, which some investors may be feeling today.

When their portfolio lags a popular benchmark, such as the Dow Jones Industrials or the S&P 500, Investors often regret being diversified and think that they should get out of their poorly performing funds and concentrate in those funds which have done better. (Learn about the benchmarks we use here.)

It’s understandable to want to boost performance, but we have to remember that past performance is no guarantee of future results. Many people receive a snapshot from their 401(k) listing their available funds with columns showing annualized performance. Consider these two funds:

	3-year	5-year	10-year	Expense Ratio
S&P 500 ETF (SPY)	11.10%	13.55%	6.88%	0.10%
Emerging Markets ETF (VWO)	2.83%	-0.07%	2.24%	0.15%

Source: Morningstar, as of 2/06/2017

Looking at the performance, there is a clear hands-down winner, right? And if you have owned the Emerging Markets fund, wouldn’t you want to switch to the “better” fund?

These types of charts are so dangerous to investors because they reinforce Performance Chasing and for diversified investors, cause Tracking Error Regret. Instead of looking backwards at what worked over the past 10 years, let’s look at the Fundamentals, at how much these stocks cost today. The same two funds:

	Price/Earnings	Price/Book	Dividend Yield	Cash Flow Growth
S&P 500 ETF (SPY)	18.66	2.65	2.21%	0.33%
Emerging Markets ETF (VWO)	12.34	1.51	3.37%	5.09%

Source: Morningstar, as of 2/06/2017

Now this chart tells a very different story. Emerging Market Stocks (EM) cost about one-third less than US stocks, based on earnings or book value. EM has a 50% higher dividend yield and these companies are growing their cash flow by 5% a year, versus only 0.33% a year for US companies.

I look at the fundamentals when determining portfolio weightings, not past performance. If you only looked at the performance chart, you’d miss seeing that EM stocks are cheap today and US stocks are more expensive. That is no guarantee that EM will beat the S&P 500 over the next 12 months, but it is a pretty good reason to stay diversified and not think that today’s winners are bound to continue their streak forever.

Performance chasing often means buying something which has become expensive, frequently near the top. That’s why I almost never recommend sector funds or single country funds (think Biotech or Korea); the investment decision is too often based on recent performance and those types of funds tend to make us less diversified rather than more diversified.

Staying diversified means that you will own some positions which are not performing as well as others in your portfolio. When the S&P 500 is having a great year, a diversified portfolio often lags that benchmark. But, when the S&P 500 is down 37% like it was in 2008, you may be glad that you own some bonds and other assets.

We use broadly diversified ETFs and mutual funds, with a willingness to rebalance and buy those positions when they are down. We have a value bent to our weightings and are willing to own assets like Emerging Markets, even if they haven’t been among the top performers in recent years. Staying diversified and focusing on the long-term plan means that you have to ignore Tracking Error Regret and Performance Chasing. Just remember that you can’t drive a car forward by looking in the rear-view mirror.

Why We’re Adding Alternatives for 2017

Posted On January 1, 2017 By Scott Stratton, CFP(R), CFA In Portfolio Management /

For 2017, we are adding a 10% allocation to Alternatives to our Premier Wealth Management model portfolios (those over $250,000). The 10% allocation will be taken pro rata from both equity and fixed income categories. A 60/40 portfolio, for example, will have 6% taken from equities and 4% from fixed income, for a new allocation that is 54% Equities, 36% Fixed, and 10% Alternatives. We made some trades in December during our year-end tax reviews, and will make the rest of the trades in the next week.

Why Alternatives? The goal of Alternatives is to provide a positive return without being tied to the stock market or interest rates. Our aim is to diversify your portfolio further with a source of uncorrelated returns. Ideally, this can provide a smoother ride and dampen our portfolio volatility. (See Morningstar on Alternatives: When, Why, and Which Ones?)

That’s the goal, but investing in Alternatives poses its own set of unique challenges. Unlike stocks and bonds, there are many types of “Alternative” investment strategies. Alternatives is a catch-all category that encompasses everything from Real Estate, Gold, Commodities, Futures, Long/Short Equity, Arbitrage, to any other Hedge Fund process. And then there are multi-strategy funds which may combine four, five, or more unrelated strategies or managers.

Even within one category, some funds may do quite well and other funds poorly in the same year. That is a much smaller risk in equities, where, for example, most large cap funds are going to have a positive return when the S&P 500 Index is up and a negative return when the Index is down. In Alternatives, there is a wide dispersion of returns even within a single category.

Our view of Alternatives, then, is that it is a satellite holding that we want to employ tactically, rather than a core strategy that we hold at all times. We think the environment of 2017 could be just such a time to want to include Alternatives.

We enter the year with equities at or near their all-time highs and valuations somewhat above their historical averages. 2016 gave us a very nice return in US stocks: 9.5% in the S&P 500 and 19.4% in the small cap Russell 2000. The maxim that “the market climbs a wall of worry” definitely was the case in 2016. While the market confounds expectations frequently, valuations, not sentiment, are our guide to how we weight segments in our allocation. Valuations today, both relative and absolute, suggest diversifying from US stocks.

In fixed income, we saw a remarkable summer low in interest rates, with the 10-Year Treasury trading at a 1.6% yield. The second half of the year was painful for bondholders, with interest rates rising a full 1% on the 10-Year. It was such a dramatic move that we think it would be a mistake to think that interest rates can continue to increase at a linear projection of the past six months. Still, we may have just seen the end of the 30 year Bull market in bonds and that suggests expected returns going forward will be both lower and more volatile than historic returns.

Our goal within each portfolio is not only to grow your wealth, but to protect and preserve what you already have. Our modelling of adding the 10% allocation to Alternatives suggests that we can potentially reduce portfolio volatility and improve the risk/reward characteristics of our models. While that is no guarantee that returns will be positive in 2017, I want you to know that we are constantly monitoring, studying, and looking for quantifiable ways to better manage your money.

When would you not want Alternatives? If you went back to the lows of March 2009, the start of the current Bull Market, adding Alternatives would have held back your performance. They aren’t aiming to generate double digit returns, which you can sometimes get in equities on a snap-back like 2009. But that’s not where we are in January 2017. Today, with US stocks and bonds looking a bit expensive, we are looking to strengthen our defensive. (ICYMI, our Four Investment Themes for 2017)

As always, I’m happy to chat about your goals, the state of the market, or what we do in our investment management process. Give me a call or drop me a note. One of the reasons why we write about investing in the blog, is to communicate to everyone at the same time and then when we do have our next meeting or call, we can focus 100% on you and not the market.