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My Two-for-Tuesday morning train WFH reads: • Stock Pickers Never Had a Chance Against Hard Math of the Market : In years like this one, when just a few big companies outperform, it’s hard to assemble a winning portfolio. 2000-2003 Dotcom implosion 6. Does it make sense that current sentiment readings are worse than: 1.
So I took it upon myself to go off and took a course in bond math, took another course in derivatives and realized the underlying fundamental concepts were barely, I mean, it wasn’t even high school math in most cases. I didn’t know what any of these terms meant. RITHOLTZ: They just became distressed.
00:03:14 [Mike Greene] So that was actually an outgrowth from my experience coming out of Wharton and you mentioned the, the, you know, the transition of people who tended to be skilled at math or physics into finance. Initially I joined to help them manage their equity portfolio. She was based out in Los Angeles.
And I did the math, and I think at that point in time, roughly speaking, assets in ETS were roughly just 10 percent, 12 percent of assets in mutual funds and I was pretty convinced that that number was to increase significantly. And I always use the exact same example, how will you invest in Google in 1998, or in Facebook in 2003?
So it’s, it’s just kind of ironic, and I’ll just throw this out as a bit of an advertisement, but like, we run a portfolio of 10 stocks, a concentrated portfolio, 00:27:41 [Speaker Changed] 10 stocks, 10 00:27:42 [Speaker Changed] Stocks, that’s it. So that’s the math. Annually, okay.
RITHOLTZ: So you launch your own firm IDW in 2003. And they end up being great candidates for us to put into to run the next big portfolio or start a new strategy. So it is attractive to go somewhere where you will now be given the ability to manage a portfolio and make decisions, or at least be on a path to learn how to do that.
I look for people that have done extracurricular work, or you know, manage their own little portfolio, or have stock ideas or businesses ideas that they want to pitch. RITHOLTZ: Why is it not surprising that a math nerd is also a placekicker? But really, even that experience was about building great friends that I played football with.
And I was a math nerd as a kid. So, so let’s talk a little bit about picking international stocks as an asset class has done fairly poorly, but it’s nearly a third of your portfolio and, and you continue to outperform. So, so you set to retire as portfolio manager this year, you mentioned your two successors.
He spends way more time on how to save $1,000 than on what your investment portfolio should look like. I couldn’t make that math work at all plausibly. “And over the past 30 years, my little portfolio … has averaged 12, most years over 13 percent.” An investment portfolio is a luxurious afterthought.
So that little detour was in 2003. So think about 2003 home prices had gone up a lot from 2000. So mortgage position in 2000 were way more valuable in 2003 than they were when they originated because they weigh less credit risk. So that’s an active part of portfolio trimming and opt and optimization.
I mean, there were some advisor pickup, but you had to be kind of on the front edge of finance, or a quant, or running your own models, which in 2003, was not that common. The academic side of how to build a portfolio, we can argue about the details, right? You want to put together a portfolio? It’s largely solved.
Matt Eagan has spent his entire career in fixed income from credit analyst to portfolio manager. I don’t, I don’t know what else to say other than there are a few people in the world that understand running a fixed income portfolio on behalf of institutional or retail clients, a as well as Matt Egan does.
Colin Camerer : So I, some of it was when I was in college at Johns Hopkins, I, I studied physics and math. And there was people, Physics didn’t have, people, psychology didn’t have math, economics was kind of the right mix. The math doesn’t math. That was too abstract. Yeah, I’m gonna vote.
That’s why the markets are much more of a mind game than a math game. And that’s why markets will always be exceedingly hard, even when the math seems easy or the future seems certain. Stop with the math.` Beyond the present lies imagination. And lots of surprises. This is the best thing I read in the last week.
So, I did the math, 20 million times a hundred. So, let me just repeat the math. And so, again, I went through this simple math. The currency devalued by 75 percent and my portfolio, which was above $1 billion, went down 90 percent. And this had an unbelievably positive affect on the value of my portfolio.
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