Faber, The Best Investment Writing

Meb Faber has assembled a wonderful collection of 32 short pieces in The Best Investment Writing, volume 1 (Harriman House, 2017). The contributors are Jason Zweig, Gary Antonacci, Morgan Housel, Ben Hunt, Todd Tresidder, Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Meb Faber, David Merkel, Norbert Keimling, Adam Butler, Stan Altshuller, Tom McClellan, Jared Dillian, Raoul Pal, Barry Ritholtz, Ken Fisher, Chris Meredith, Aswath Damodaran, Ben Carlson, Dave Nadig, Josh Brown, Wesley Gray, Corey Hoffstein and Justin Sibears, Jason Hsu and John West, John Reese, Larry Swedroe, Cullen Roche, Jonathan Clements, Michael Kitces, Charlie Bilello, and John Mauldin.

There’s such an abundance of research and thought in this volume that it’s hard to pick out a couple of pieces to write about. My choices are decidedly idiosyncratic.

First, Wes Gray’s “Even God Would Get Fired as an Active Investor.” Who can pass up a title like that? Gray’s “God” knows what stocks are going to be long-term winners and losers and initially constructs a long-only portfolio that will be the top decile five-year winner. The problem with “God’s” portfolio, rebalanced monthly and analyzed from 1927 to 2016, is that it has terrible drawdowns. Unfortunately, “God’s” long-short hedge fund has the same problem. As Gray writes, “The relative performance on God’s hedge fund is often abysmal and he’d surely make the cover of Barron’s or the WSJ on multiple occasions throughout his career. The passive index would eat his lunch on multiple occasions—often getting beaten by 50 percentage points—or more—on multiple occasions!” The moral of the story is that active investors must have a long horizon. And, I would add, the faith that they, or their fund managers, are more god-like than their competition.

Second, Jason Zweig’s “A Portrait of the Investing Columnist as a (Very) Young Man.” Zweig’s parents were antique dealers (as were mine), and young Jason was a quick study (I wasn’t). He recalls a sale he made and “a dirty old rag” he discovered—an early Frederic Church painting which ended up in the collection of the White House. He notes “how important it is to be in the right place at the right time. The art and antiques business in the 1970s was a remarkable confluence of inefficiencies and opportunities to exploit them.” That market has now changed dramatically: “undervalued art and antiques have all but disappeared.” The stock market, like the antiques market, has also stopped handing out rewards to the well-informed stock-picker. “If you’re applying the tools that worked so well in the inefficient markets of the past to the efficient markets of today, you are wasting your time and energy. … If investors are to prosper from inefficient markets, they have to evaluate which markets still are inefficient. Areas like microcap stocks or high-yield bonds, where index funds can’t easily maneuver, offer some promise.”