Last year was a high-speed test in managing our emotions

by James Parkyn

In year-end retrospectives over past few weeks, we’ve been reminded just how extraordinary 2020 was on so many fronts.

From the COVID pandemic to the Black Lives Matter movement to the fraught U.S. election and many other momentous events and devastating outcomes, it was a year that challenged our emotional resilience like none other in recent history.

It was no different in the markets. The stock market crash in March gave way to a lightening fast recovery. For investors, 2020 was a real-time, high-speed test of our risk tolerance and how well we’re able to control our emotions in the face of exceptional volatility.

To learn the investment lessons of 2020, it’s instructive to think back to how we all felt at various points during the year. The initial market plunge understandably provoked fear in many, especially because it came at a time of great uncertainty in other areas of our lives, as we navigated a health and economic crisis.

When the markets rallied, many investors were still processing the crash and were distrustful the recovery could be sustained. As it became clear, massive governments and central banks interventions were supporting the economy and markets, investors became increasingly confident in the rally’s durability.

The remarkable market gains since March have once again been concentrated in the technology sector where enthusiasm has been fuelled by the economic effects of the pandemic, including remote work and online shopping. And then there’s Tesla—a phenomenon unto itself.

When fear fades, regret often takes over. How much money could you have made by betting on a few big tech names rather than broadly diversifying your investments?

How about the strength of the U.S. stock market versus developed and emerging markets elsewhere in the world? Wouldn’t it make more sense to concentrate on the U.S. market.

However, if 2020 taught us anything, it’s just how unpredictable the markets can be. Our portfolios must be designed to both weather unexpected developments and take advantage of favourable outcomes.

As investment author Larry Swedroe observed in his review of the book, The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel, these are not easy psychological waters to navigate.

“Unexpected events and random luck can lead to good decisions having bad outcomes and poor decisions having good outcomes,” Swedroe writes. “Success is a lousy teacher because it can seduce us into thinking we cannot lose. Thus, we should not become overconfident in our judgments when things turn out well. Similarly, failure is a lousy teacher because it can seduce smart people into thinking their decisions were poor, when failure was just the unforgiving reality of risk showing up.”

It’s not easy for bright, successful people to accept their inability to outsmart the markets. However, sticking with a well-engineered portfolio through good times and bad is the hallmark of intelligent investing.

Helping clients manage their emotions is an important part of what we do here at PWL Capital. In that sense, we see our role as advisors helping people make good decisions, not facilitators of risky moves driven by passing emotions.

The coming year will no doubt hold more surprises, but there is much to be hopeful about with the roll-out of vaccines around the world. We will be here to keep your investments and personal finances on track, and the whole PWL team wishes you a happy, healthy and prosperous 2021.

Studying past fund performance won’t get you where you want to go

by James Parkyn

It’s been quite a rollercoaster ride for investors this year. A deep plunge in the stock market last spring was followed by a powerful rally that has sent the S&P 500 to new highs and the S&P/TSX Composite close to its high.

Let’s imagine a retirement saver, named Robert, who has been sitting on the sidelines through all this turbulence and has finally decided to take the plunge and invest a chunk of his money in the stock market.

Robert watches business news channels on TV and has heard various mutual fund managers predict where the markets and individual stocks will be heading in the coming months. With all the conflicting advice and predictions he’s heard, it’s no surprise he has a hard time deciding which managers to trust with his money.

It’s at this point that Robert and his investment advisor decide to look at the past performance of various mutual funds as a guide to finding the best ones to buy.

Of course, they know about the fine print at the bottom of mutual fund marketing materials that warns “past performance is not an indicator of future results,” but how else is Robert supposed to choose?

Sadly for him and countless other investors in actively managed funds, the fine print isn’t just perfunctory boiler plate. Past fund performance actually offers little insight into future returns.

Research by Dimensional Fund Advisors shows that just 21% of top quartile equity funds in the U.S. maintained a top-quartile ranking in the following five years (in data from 2009-2019). For fixed income, the number is 29%.

Even if you were one of the lucky ones who had invested in one of those top-performing funds, you would have had no way of knowing it when you made your investment. The odds were definitely against that outcome.

Indeed, a huge percentage of fund managers don’t generate returns over their benchmark index. In the case of actively managed U.S. equity funds, 89% underperformed the S&P Composite 1500 index over ten years to the end of 2019, according to the S&P Dow Jones SPIVA report.

Even a mutual fund manager who is able to beat the market for 10 years or longer might just be the beneficiary of random luck.

The most famous example of a manager whose luck ran out spectacularly is Bill Miller. Managing Legg Mason’s flagship fund, Miller beat the S&P 500 index for an astonishing 15 consecutive years from 1991 through 2005. Then, as the financial crisis and recession began to unfold, Miller made disastrous bets on financial stocks that led to his fund losing two-thirds of its value by the end of 2008.

Miller himself attributed his winning streak to “maybe 95% luck.” And a former investment strategist at Legg Mason estimated the probability of beating the market in the 15 years ending 2005 was 1 in 2.3 million.

The reality is that relying on past performance to choose investments is like driving your car looking in the rear view mirror. It doesn’t work (unless you’re driving in reverse). The evidence clearly shows that actively managed funds cannot consistently beat the market and studying their past performance will only gives you the illusion they can.

For Robert, the answer is to stop worrying about finding the best active managers and, instead, use passively managed index funds to build a broadly diversified, low-cost portfolio. That’s the way to keep your eyes on the road ahead and be prepared for any turns, bumps or detours that may come along the way.

How to make sure diversification doesn’t turn into “di-worse-ification”

by James Parkyn

At its core, investing should be a relatively simple process. However, when emotions, misguided theories and bad advice enter the picture, things can get very complicated.

The right way to invest is to decide on an asset allocation strategy that fits your goals and risk tolerance while ensuring your portfolio is broadly diversified across asset classes and geographies. Then, you implement the strategy by selecting low cost securities and staying invested through the ups and downs in the markets to reap all the returns they are offering.

Of course, it takes expertise to optimally follow this recipe, including choosing the best securities to do the job; rebalancing periodically back to your target asset allocation; and making sure your portfolio is tax efficient.

Nevertheless, the guiding principle should be simplicity. But many investors opt for just the opposite—they choose to make their portfolios more complex.

That’s not surprising. They are bombarded every day with news about the economy, international affairs and market ups and downs. They hear pitches from advisors about the latest specialized investment opportunity, and they end up buying.

Their portfolios become packed with a wide variety of investments—evidence of the different fads and theories they’ve fallen prey to over time. They may even believe they have diversified their portfolio by adding narrowly focused funds or individual stocks. In fact, the result is not diversification but di-worse-ification—they’ve made their portfolio worse by not optimizing their diversification.

If they were to take off the fund wrapper and look at the underlying securities they own, they would find they had increased their risk by weighting it toward a particular sector, region or asset class,  and incurred high management fees to do so. All will be well when the market is going up, but when the wind turns their returns can end up on the rocks.

For example, there’s a huge number of mutual funds and ETFs focused on the tech sector. They’re popular these days with people hoping to cash in on this year’s tech sector rally. In my previous blog, I discussed the dangers of becoming transfixed by the U.S. stock market, as its led higher by tech stocks, to the detriment of other asset classes, such as emerging markets.

Another example is the current search for yield in light of historically low interest rates. This is leading some to take on more risk by concentrating their portfolio in dividend stocks or other higher yielding securities.

There are many other possible sector or tactical bets you can make, but they all share the same defect—you are trying to outsmart the market by forecasting winners and losers. We know from long experience that this doesn’t work over the long run and that all these bets are not helping to diversify your portfolio.

On the other hand, robust, global diversification does work. By combining securities whose performance is not well correlated, you lower your risk without reducing your expected returns.

It’s not easy to stay disciplined when the economy is going through a sustained period of turbulence and the markets are volatile. But it’s good to know that sticking to simplicity in your investments is your best choice when everything else has become so complicated.

How diversification allows you to sleep better at night

by James Parkyn

It seemed as if nothing could stand in the way of U.S. tech stocks. Since the spring, giants like Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Tesla climbed ever higher despite a worsening pandemic in many states and a deep recession gripping the global economy.

That changed in early September when without warning U.S. tech heavyweights hit a wall. A sharp tech sell-off dragged the wider U.S. market down with the S&P 500 falling 7% over just three trading days.

No one can say whether U.S. stocks will continue to fall in the coming weeks or recover to hit new heights. But looking back at the relative performance of world stock markets, you might be tempted to bet heavily on a U.S. market rebound.

After all, U.S. stocks have been on a tear over the last decade. The S&P 500 Index had an annualized compound return of 13.6% from 2010 to 2019. That compared to 5.3% for developed markets outside the U.S (MSCI World ex USA Index), and just 3.7% for the MSCI Emerging Markets Index.

However, you only have to look a bit further back in history to understand why it’s so important to not become transfixed by recent returns in any one market.

The last time the U.S. market surged to extraordinary heights was during the dot.com years of the late 1990s. When the bubble burst, there followed a period from 2000-2009 that’s come to be known as “the lost decade” for the U.S. stocks. In those years, the S&P 500 Index recorded one of its worst 10-year performances with an annualized compound return of minus 0.95%, according to this report from Dimensional.

By contrast, emerging markets during those years produced an annual compound return of 9.8%. So a portfolio diversification strategy that included exposure to emerging markets would have buffered your poor U.S. returns.

A closer look at historical performance of emerging markets sheds even more light on the potential benefits of diversifying your portfolio outside the U.S. and Canada.

Another report from Dimensional notes that a consistent allocation to emerging markets from 1988 to 2019 generated an annualized return of 10.7%. That beat the 5.9% from developed markets outside the U.S. and was similar to the 10.8% generated by S&P 500, including the strong returns of the last decade.

Now you would have had to put up with a lot of volatility in emerging markets during that period, much more than in developed markets, underlining the need for patience, discipline and appropriate asset allocation, the Dimensional report cautions.

However, the report also notes that emerging markets are not only a growing segment of global markets (12.5% of global capitalization at the end of 2019), but also generally “have become more open to foreign investors with fewer constraints on capital mobility.”

The composition of these markets has also evolved. While you might think of emerging markets as primarily resource based, you would be mistaken in the case of Asian economies such as China, Taiwan and South Korea where the technology sector is flourishing. Indeed, the leading sector weighting in the MSCI Emerging Market Index is information technology at 18.4%.

The benefits of geographic diversification are clear. Investing in global markets lowers your portfolio risk by exposing you to a wider set of economic and market forces than those provided by just the U.S. or Canadian markets.

By ensuring your portfolio has the right mix of assets to provide maximum diversification, you are giving yourself the best chance of reaping the returns that global markets have to offer while controlling the amount of risk you’re taking.

In part 2 of this series, I will look at the other forms of diversification and the dangers of “di-worse-ification.”

Look beyond the headlines: Patience is the key to building wealth

by James Parkyn

In the spring of 2008, the New York Times published an article with the headline: An Oracle of Oil Predicts $200-a-Barrel Crude.

The oracle in question was Goldman Sachs equity analyst Arjun Murti who was predicting a “super spike” in the price of oil, continuing a run that had brought it to $130 a barrel at the time the article ran in May 2008. (All figures in U.S. dollars.)

“The grim calculus of Mr. Murti’s prediction…is enough to give anyone pause: In an America of $200 oil, gasoline could cost more than $6 a gallon,” the article says.

As the piece noted, Murti was far from alone in forecasting a further surge in oil prices. In Canada, former CIBC World Markets chief economist Jeff Rubin also called for $200 a barrel oil and even wrote a book describing all the implications for the economy.

Sadly for these analysts, the stage had already been set for the collapse of oil prices. The 2008-09 financial crisis and accompanying recession sent prices to below $40 a barrel. But it wasn’t long before prices were climbing again and the oil bulls were back at it, only to be disappointed when the fracking revolution helped flood the world with crude.

It’s been a quite a rollercoaster. Now, think what would have happened to your investment portfolio had you actually taken these headlines seriously and loaded up on the stocks of energy producers and other companies that benefit from high oil prices.

Every day you can find predictions from stock analysts, professional investors and economists about what’s going to happen in the markets.

These forecasts are often persuasively argued, pointing to “fundamentals,” market history and various data points. And they are often wrong.

In fact, the evidence is that the experts are no better at seeing into the future than you and me. Their predictions have been proven wholly unreliable as demonstrated in another Times article. It reports on research into the forecasts made by Wall Street strategists between 2000 and the end of 2019.

“The gap between the median forecast and the market return was 4.31 percentage points, an error of almost 45 percent,” the article says. “The median forecast was that stocks would rise every year for the last 20 years, but they fell in six years. The consensus was wrong about the basic direction of the market 30 percent of the time.”

Actually, market predictions are worse than useless because they generate media commentary that can throw your investment plan off track.

To better understand the danger to your financial health, you only have to think back to the dire headlines at the time the market was falling in February and March in response to the pandemic crisis. For example, a headline in the Globe and Mail on March 12 warned A significant bear market is just starting.

We know in hindsight the market would bottom just 11 days later. On that day, a powerful rally began that saw stocks rise 38% in Canada and 40% in the U.S to the end of June. By the end of August, client portfolios we manage had returned to close to their opening value at the beginning of the year. If the negative headlines had scared you out of the market in March, you would have missed out on that rally.

Of course, we might be headed for another market downturn if there’s a serious second wave of the pandemic or some other negative event in the weeks ahead. And that’s the point—we just don’t know what’s going to happen and neither does anyone else.

However, we do know that $1,000 invested in world equity markets in 1985 would have turned into $28,000 by the end of 2019. That’s why it’s so important to tune out the day-to-day noise and focus on long-term returns.

It may not be exciting, but the only investing news that matters is that patiently holding a broadly diversified portfolio that reflects your tolerance for risk through good times and bad is the best way to build wealth.