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A simple way to think about this: everyone in society has a portfolio of assets, they allocate to that portfolio based on risk/return/liquidity/etc, and the mos
by hogFeast 6y ago
A simple way to think about this: everyone in society has a portfolio of assets, they allocate to that portfolio based on risk/return/liquidity/etc, and the most important ratio here is cash to assets.
At this stage in the cycle, perceived risk is very low, expected returns are very high (some of the stuff you read on this is next-level crazy, ppl saying they are guaranteed a double digit real return from equities), and so no-one wants to hold cash...any cash. They hold very low levels of cash relative to total assets.
At some point, this will change. Cash % of assets is basically stationary (to some extent, the mean % has probably trended down this decade slightly though). Large-scale fraud will lead to a re-examination of the relative reward of assets, actual losses mean that your ratio of cash to assets drops, and people sell to either increase liquidity/panic/etc.
Bubbles sometimes deflate slowly, most often they do not because people aren't rational. If you buy into a stock expecting to sell it someone else at a greater price, what do you do if you wake up one morning and it is down 20%? You get out. There is no reason to hold it. You can't earn fundamental value at that price. This is happening in multiple stocks, margin calls, brokers start liquidating client portfolios en masse...you get the picture.
- zwieback 6y agoOk, so I have to hope that the guys managing my 401K act more rationally, e.g. slower to jump on these stocks and slower to get out of mainstream assets. I guess that's not guaranteed but I would hope they know better than to invest in this deli.
- hogFeast 6y agoNo. If anything, they are going to be more irrational. The incentives for most advisers are horrible. Ymmv, if you have a good adviser then great. But I used to work in this area, and even in my first real job (not my first job in the industry though) the level of ignorance was brutally obvious. For example, my first employer was a single adviser firm that just got acquired for $5m...this guy didn't know how to use Excel, he didn't know how to build a financial forecast, he didn't understand that life expectancy at birth was different to expectancy at retirement, he didn't understand basic elements of finance (for example, why you can't make money buying a stock and selling after they pay a dividend), he didn't understand how to compute returns, and falsified those numbers in marketing when they showed bad performance...and this is a guy who has hundreds of clients, and $100m+ in assets. However bad you think it is, it is much much worse. Most of the people on here will do better if they apply a little time, and understand that human reasoning is flawed (i.e. don't get swept in the hot new thing). That is all that is required.
- zwieback 6y agoScary! I'm still 8-10 yrs from retirement but most of my funds are in target-retirement-date type funds with lower risk. This latest round of news stories and conversations like this motivate me to look at what actual stocks I own. I can totally relate to the irrational exuberance - I look at how well my investments have done through the pandemic and expect things to get "even better when the economy wakes up again" but that could be totally wrong.
- hogFeast 5y agoTarget date funds are least bad...if they are composed of ETFs. It isn't worth looking at individual stocks. If you want another layer of diversification: add a different asset class (for example, more bonds), or add more geographical exposure. This isn't advice of course, so be careful to understand how any change has impacted performance in the past (it isn't always a good guide but it is better than nothing).
- scsilver 6y agoDid you report them to finra?
- hogFeast 5y agoNot in the US. Unbelievably, there aren't specific rules against falsifying returns if you are careful with how you present them (for example, the CFA, the main accreditation for fund managers, just has a "code of conduct"...ironically, the guy who is the director of conduct on the CFA board in my country used to steal from employees). This guy didn't actually know this, he just didn't understand how to construct returns, and made "adjustments" until the number was right. His only real area of knowledge was complex, high-fee insurance products, he knew nothing about actual investing (he used to work as a captive salesman at an insurance company).
- nerdponx 5y agoI think they were more asking about target date funds at major institutions like T Rowe Price, Fidelity, Vanguard, etc. But that's a hell of a story.
- conjectures 5y agoAgain, investing in passive index funds avoids most of the deli-style shenanigans. More policy based decision making, less judgment calls.