Irrational Exuberance and the Dow

From The New Yorker, January 15, 1966

Little did Hayden Stone or the rest of Wall Street know, but the DJIA's mid 1960's high (1,000!) marked the end of the great post-World-War-II investment boom.

Stocks staggered on through the Go-Go Years, but not until 1982 did the market begin its next great advance. Hayden Stone itself did not survive the 1970's.

In the long run, of course, Hayden Stone was right. Families whose founders invested boldly in 1966 and stayed the course now enjoy the fruits of a DJIA that just hit 20,000.

Evidence that you can't get what you don't pay for

It was just over 16 years ago that the Harvard Management Company and investment chief Jack Meyers parted ways.  Meyers had quintupled Harvard's endowment, growing it from $5 billion to $25 billion.  He was paid a pittance for that performance, by Wall Street standards at the time. Nevertheless, the Harvard alumni were outraged when they learned he was paid $7 million in one year, even though his compensation was tied to beating established benchmarks.   Apparently the alumni were confident that comparable returns could be had for less cost.

It didn't work out that way.

 Today's Wall Street Journal [paywall] reports yet another major shakeup for the Harvard Management Company.  The endowment has annualized gains over the last 10 years of 5.7%, well below Yale's 8.1% and the second lowest in the Ivy League.  Four different heads have tried to meet the return targets over the last decade, with the latest starting last December.

The new plan:  Outsource almost everything, and lay off 230 employees.

The nice thing about this approach is that the alumni never need to know how much the outside managers are being paid.  If they ever get good endowment returns again, they don't have to lose sleep over whether the manager was paid too much for achieving them.

A new spirit of noncompetition at Harvard Management is revealed in the closing paragraph of the WSJ piece:

Remaining staffers will focus on Harvard’s portfolio overall instead of on specific asset classes. Mr. Narvekar plans to tie staffers’ pay to the endowment’s overall performance instead of that of their asset class starting in fiscal year 2018.

We'll be watching to see how that turns out.

Is Portfolio Rebalancing a Waste of Time?

Could investment advisers become even more redundant? On average, they can't pick stocks that do better than average. So they settle for allocating assets and periodically rebalancing to maintain the ideal allocation. But what if their clients would be just as well off if their portfolios remained untouched?

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Some investment professionals, the WSJ reports, now believe "rebalancing is no better or worse a strategy than buy-and-hold."

A study mentioned here confirms that belief:

Compare the path of two hypothetical portfolios constructed by T. Rowe Price. Each portfolio starts with $100,000, with 60% in a mix of stocks—including shares of large and small companies, U.S. and foreign firms—and 40% in high-quality U.S. bonds. One portfolio is rebalanced annually over the 20-year period through 2015; the other is left alone. Both portfolios deliver the same returns, with annualized gains of just a bit more than 7%.

Rebalancing did reduce volatility. In theory, lowering volatility by periodic rebalancing should enable a skittish investor to come closer to  the long-term returns enjoyed by a buy-and-hold investor. 

In practice, rebalancing requires the skittish investor to shift money from stocks just when their gains make them look like a great buy and purchase stocks when their prices are scarily depressed. Easier said than done.

The Estate Plan That Amazed Samuel Pepys

Samuel Pepys

Not long after Christmas, three and a half centuries ago, Royal Navy bureaucrat and diarist extraordinary Samuel Pepys paid a call on Lord Crew. There he heard a remarkable story of inheritance.

An old friend had left Lord Crew's brother, Mr. Nathaniel Crew, an estate paying 600-700 pounds per  annum. Surely a worthy income in those days.

But Mr. Crew's good fortune had not come by bequest or devise. The recently deceased friend had left no will.

Nathaniel Crew

Rather, the amazed Pepys reports, the friend "had, above ten years since, made over his estate to this Mr. Crew, to him and his heirs for ever, and given Mr. Crew the keeping of the deeds in his own hand all this time; by which, if he would, he might have taken present possession of the estate…."

"This is as great an act of confident friendship," writes Pepys, "as this latter age, I believe, can shew."

Oddly, in his portrait the trustworthy Nathaniel looks a bit shifty. In reality he went on to become one of the Church of England's longest serving bishops.

“Does anyone under the age of 30 even know what a check is?”

At year's end your obedient blogger wrote a check. If he lived in Denmark, he'd never write another.