I wrote last year about how to construct the Ivy League portfolio proposed by David Swensen, the endowment fund manager at Yale and author of the nerdy investment classic Unconventional Success
My Ivy League portfolio was based on a US article that followed Swensen’s advice; I simply re-worked it for UK ETFs.
While it has the diversification that Swensen champions, I knew even then that this ETF portfolio wasn’t really a proxy for the true Yale fund, which has delivered market trouncing average returns of over 16% in the 21 years to 2007.
Rather, it was a case of do what he says, not what he does. The Ivy League portfolio follows the advice Swensen presents in Unconventional Success as the optimal strategy for private investors – to use ETFs, avoid non-Government bonds, and shun expensive funds.
The Ivy League Portfolio Vs. Swensen
It was therefore always going to be interesting to see whether a private investor could get Yale-like returns from these six cheap to buy-and-hold ETFs.
And the answer appears to be: we can’t.
According to an article published on The Motley Fool last week, the real Yale portfolio run by Swensen trashed the US ETF proxy in every year (ending June) from 2005 to 2008.
As for the year ending June 2009, that year the ETF portfolio and the real Yale portfolio matched each other. But it was hardly a champagne moment – both recorded a loss of 25%! (The results to June 2010 aren’t yet in).
Factors that saw the real Yale porfolio win
The Motley Fool says it’s easy to see where the real Yale portfolio got its edge:
According to the Yale fund’s annual report (pdf file) for the year ended 30 June 2009, the fund had less than 20% in domestic and foreign equities, and less than 5% in fixed income.
Around a quarter of the fund was allocated to ‘Absolute Return’, another quarter to ‘Private Equity’, whilst the largest allocation, nearly a third of the portfolio, was to ‘Real Assets’.
Interesting.
Firstly, it seems Swensen was as bearish about the Government bond bubble as I was back in late 2008, given the small amount he was holding in June 2009. Still, a US private investor sticking to Swensen’s fixed boundaries for the ETF model portfolio would have only seen their 15% allocation of Treasuries drop in value by 1% to June anyway, thanks to the big rally of late 2008 they’d have enjoyed before the pullback.
No, the real damage was done by the ETF portfolio’s weighting towards equity and commercial property, which fell between 30%-50% in the year to June 2009 alone.
In contrast, Swensen had more than 75% of his money in very un-ETF like funds, presumably in an attempt to avoid correlation with equities.
Yale’s out-performance would therefore appear to be a clear win for both active fund management and market timing, which is contrary both to Swensen’s book and my own modest thoughts on investing!
Is it fair to judge the ETF Ivy League portfolio this way?
You can certainly argue it’s not a useful comparison to pitch Swensen’s model ETF portfolio against what he actually does for Yale:
- The institutional funds Swensen buys for Yale are cheaper than those sold to private investors, and he has a team of people to investigate them before investing.
- Plenty of the out-performance of private equity and real estate had dissipated by 2009.
- March 2009 onwards would have seen a huge surge in the ETF portfolio’s equity positions – perhaps even enough to make up for previous years. The dates covered in the Fool article are then unfortunate for the ETF approach. It will be interesting to see the results to June 2010.
- Everything became correlated in 2008 and 2009, which meant it was harder for a simple ETF portfolio to diversify away the big falls in the market.
On the other hand, we’re more interested in results than in excuses. We can’t invest alongside Swensen, so can we do anything to better replicate his method?
Doing a Swensen to spice up the all-ETF approach
It’s no easy thing for a private investor to access decent absolute return or hedge funds. As Swensen himself says in Unconventional Success, big institutions get superior deals and are better equipped to evaluate what they’re offered.
Yet it can’t be beyond us to add some assets to Swensen’s bare bones ETF portfolio to try to diversify further, like he does with Yale.
We’re told Swensen’s money was mainly in absolute return, private equity, and real assets as of June 2009. What can we do to copy him?
Absolute return funds – I’m sceptical about whether most absolute return funds will deliver what they promise over the long-term. Private investors also face higher charges and greater risk, due to not being able to do the due diligence that Swensen’s large team will bring to bear. I think absolute return funds are a classic case of dangerous exotics. But even the Daily Mail is now suggesting otherwise, so check out their article if you want some names to research further. Personally I’d suggest you increase bond holdings or cash if you’re nervy, rather than buying a fund manager a sports car. Alternatively, consider a cautious investment trust like the Personal Assets trust, which is relatively transparent and not too expensive to hold.
Private equity – Here’s better news. Investment trusts like 3i and HGCapital enable retail investors to get exposure to the private equity cycle, and they currently look cheap. Some even pay a dividend. They will be correlated with equities, though. Riskier but of interest to some UK investors – and potentially less correlated – are Venture Capital Trusts (VCTs), which invest in small companies and can pay a hefty dividend. Many have a dismal record, so I’d stick to the likes of Northern and Baronsmead’s VCTs. The annual expenses will be over 3%, but the dividends are tax-free.
Real assets – Here it’s actually easier for us than Swensen. He has to invest in gold and the like – and so can we – but we can also buy antique furniture, paintings, stamps or even a bigger home to try to lock in some of the benefits of real assets (chiefly a lack of correlation with equities and some inflation proofing). Your collection of first edition Marvel comics might not be big enough to excite a Yale fund manager, but it could work wonders for your own balance sheet.
The Ivy League portfolio: Take 2
Here’s an example of how the Ivy League ETF-based portfolio might be tweaked in light of the above thoughts. I should stress – as should be obvious – that this is not a portfolio recommended by David Swensen!
Also note that while I’ve reduced equity holdings, I’ve also increased the emerging market weighting to 10% since last time, and reduced REIT exposure, both in light of comments made by Swensen in interviews since he wrote Unconventional Success.
The NEW Swensen inspired portfolio
- Domestic Equity (10%): FTSE 100 / FTSE 250 (ISF / MIDD)
- Emerging Market Equity (10%): MSCI Emerging Market Equity (IEEM)
- Foreign Developed Equity (10%): FTSE Developed World (IWXU)
- Property (REITs) (10%): FTSE EPRA/NAREIT UK Property (IUKP)
- U.K. Government Bonds (15%): FTSE UK All Stocks Gilt (IGLT)
- U.K. Inflation-Linked Bonds (15%): £ Index-Linked Gilts (INXG)
Plus additions of:
- Absolute return (10%): Personal Assets trust / 3-4 expensive funds
- Private equity (10%): Investment trusts (3i / HGcapital / VCTs)
- Real assets (10%): Physical Gold ETF (PHGP) / Your stamp collection
My revamping doesn’t even match – imperfectly – the weightings accorded by Swensen in his Yale fund to private equity and absolute return. But it does reduce pure equity exposure – although the investment trusts I’ve suggested will undoubtedly be somewhat correlated with the markets. The bigger holding of government bonds should offset some of this.
Also note that when buying investment trusts or funds, it’s a good idea to invest through several different companies to increase diversification and reduce the risk of management failure or fraud.
Beware: You could be tinkering at the wrong time
While I quite like the look of the Ivy League Portfolio 2.0, I suspect it’s a terrible time to reduce equity exposure so radically.
Swensen made the same point in an interview with Yale’s Alumni Magazine at the nadir of the bear market last year:
If an individual investor followed the program I outlined in Unconventional Success, they probably did reasonably well, through the crisis, thus far. They’d have 15 percent of their assets in U.S. Treasury bonds. They’d have another 15 percent in U.S. Treasury inflation-protected securities. Those two asset classes have performed well.
Of course, the other 70 percent of assets are in equities, which have not done well. […]
I recommend that investors rebalance. Rebalancing is even more important amidst these huge declines in the stock market because it presents a great opportunity. People can sell the Treasury securities that have appreciated dramatically to bring their allocation to the 15 percent target, and they can redeploy those funds into domestic equities and foreign equities and emerging market equities and real estate investment trusts, all of which are now much cheaper, and therefore have higher prospective returns.
Such rebalancing would indeed have led to huge gains in 2009 to 2010, as well as reducing the risks of holding overvalued government bonds. Read my series on rebalancing your portfolio to learn more.
Note: As ever, this article is just for your interest. It is not personal investment advice. Read about other easy ETF portfolios before making any decisions.
My weekly musing, followed by the regular link-fest of money and investing reads.
I have mixed feelings about Amazon’s Kindle book reader, which is about to come out in two cheaper and more powerful flavours.
At £149, the 3G Kindle
Books are one of my few spending weaknesses. I don’t buy many books that I don’t read, but it’s more than clothes I don’t wear or food I don’t eat. (I will get fat before I throw food out!)
Worse, these books accumulate despite my fairly cavalier habit of giving the ones I like to friends. My investing library alone is three shelves of double-stacked books deep, and I’ve got shelves and shelves of other books.
The book hoard is annoying on many levels:
- All these books need space, which means I rent a bigger flat than otherwise.
- They pack into more than a dozen boxes, so aren’t easy or cheap to move.
- They remind me how much money I’ve spent on now-forgotten books.
- Since I give away the best books, I’m left with a pretty lousy collection (investing books aside – those stay with me!)
- I’ll never be able to live out of a suitcase with all these books (a faint aspiration of mine is to do so for a year or two before I die. Preferably not the last year.)
I’ve recently got rid of over 300 magazines that I’d been carting around for a decade, and the temptation of now swapping my library for a Kindle
But do we really want to put every aspect of our art and culture onto a digital upgrade treadmill, as has already happened with movies and music?
True, Amazon keeps a record of what books you’ve bought. This means that when you upgrade your Kindle hardware, you don’t need to buy the books again.
But upgrading the Kindle every 2-3 years is still effectively a hefty tax on reading – perhaps £50 a year, amortized out, on top of the price of the books.
It’s certainly not the cheapest solution. Bookmooch is just one of several book-swapping alternatives for frugalistas. The clever thing with this one is you don’t need to find an exact match with another member. Rather, you send books to whoever asks for them and accumulate points, which you can then ‘spend’ getting the books you want.
Perhaps authors should do more to promote digital readers like the Kindle
Update 3/5/2012: Brokers are now listing LLPC as due to resume payments of coupons on 31 May. Looks like the gamble has paid off. With luck, 10%+ yield locked in for perpetuity, notwithstanding another banking crash. 🙂
Important: What follows is not a recommendation to buy or sell shares. I’m just a private investor, storing and sharing notes. Read my disclaimer.
Previously I’ve written about my purchase of Natwest preference shares. I’ve now added some Lloyds TSB 9.25% Non-Cumulative Irredeemable Preference Shares to my portfolio, too.
These Lloyds preference shares – which I’ll sometimes call by their stock ticker, LLPC, below, because Lloyds TSB 9.25% Non-Cumulative Irredeemable Preference Shares isn’t the catchiest name you ever heard – are a trickier proposition than the Natwest preference shares.
For a start, LLPC shares are not currently paying an income, and almost certainly won’t for two years.
More on that in a minute. First, some details:
Lloyds 9.25% Preference Shares
Ticker: LLPC
To buy: 83.5p
Coupon: 9.25%
Running yield: 11.1% (Suspended)
Payments: Twice yearly (31/5, 30/11)
Other details: Non-cumulative, non-mandatory
LLPC summary on Digital Look
Other features of the LLPC preference shares
- Perpetual: That 9.25% coupon is payable forever (when it’s paid!)
- Non-cumulative: Investors don’t get recompense for skipped coupons.
- Non-mandatory: Because they’re discretionary, the EU has forced Lloyds to show discretion – and blocked the coupon!
- As I understand it, payment of a dividend to ordinary shareholders is not permitted unless the coupon on these preference shares is paid, too.
Please also read my introductory article on preference shares if you need to.
No income expected until 2012
Back to that snag – there’s an apparent 11.1% running yield on the prefs, but you’ll have to wait for it.
The UK government aid given to Lloyds Banking Group at the time of the banking bailout was deemed by the EU to constitute state aid. As part of the subsequent legal wrangling, it was agreed that Lloyds would not pay coupons on its non-mandatory tier 1 and upper tier 2 securities for a period of two years, starting January 31st 2010.
These LLPC Lloyds preference shares fall into that category, and so their coupon was blocked. The first payment that holders of LLPC can be pretty confident of receiving will arrive in May 2012.
A further significant point is that Lloyds cannot pay a dividend to ordinary Lloyds shareholders without also paying LLPC holders.
Could they pay out before 2012?
Some private investors have been trying to outwit the Lloyds legal department and prove that it didn’t have to suspend payments of LLPC and certain other Lloyds preference shares – or even that it legally shouldn’t have.
It’s a very fiddly debate, involving tens of thousands of words exchanged. So far Lloyds has won the day. I don’t pretend to understand the intricacies, but I’ve had some insight into how these big banks operate from a legal perspective, and unfortunately I don’t think the investors will win.
Separately, some analysts suggest Lloyds may want to resume paying ordinary dividends before 2012. The Lloyds dividend was sacrosanct for 200 years, and the board will be keen to restart a payout as soon as possible.
These observers feel there may be a way to fudge the EU ruling on Lloyds – by fiddling with its capital position or some other ruse – in order to lift the block on the preference shares coupon, and thus the effective block on ordinary dividends.
It is really more about political wrangling than law. The nutshell theory is that as EU regulations can be made on a whim, presumably some ‘fix’ can be agreed with Brussels on-the-fly, too.
I don’t think it’s very likely, but it’s an opinion in the market.
Yet more bad news: the 11.1% yield isn’t really 11.1%
If you’re wondering why I bought these shares, you should know it isn’t for the 11.1% yield – because the effective yield is smaller.
It’s true that if you take the 9.25% coupon and the bid price of 83.5p, and work out the running yield, it comes to 11.1%.
But remember, we’re not seeing payments for two years! And due to the time value of money, buying LLPC today means paying a price for waiting.
There’s a complicated way to work this out, and a down-and-dirty way that amounts to the same thing.
Here’s the dirty way:
Buying LLPC shares today means forgoing 18.5p in income.
This effectively means the price of the shares is 83.5p+18.5p = 102p.
The running yield on a bid price of 102p is then (9.25/102) = 9%
It’s no coincidence that’s the same running yield as on the Natwest preference shares. In fact, it may even suggest LLPC are over-priced, since the Natwest issue looks more secure, and is mandatory and cumulative.
Why I bought the LLPC preference shares
At this point you might be wondering if I’ve lost my marbles? These are income shares that don’t pay an income, that aren’t as attractive as an equally (ill)-liquid issue from Natwest, and which will continue to be dogged by banking wobbles.
However there are several reasons to expect a bit more reward from LLPC in return for some of the risks:
1. Capital appreciation when EU block lifts
In 2012, LLPC will hopefully be paying its coupon again and the unprecedented block will be a thing of the past. At this stage it will yield similar to other bank preference shares, such as NWBD, with perhaps a spread of 0.5% or so to allow for its less attractive status. This means the 18.5p I’m forgoing as income now I expect to make as a capital gain by 2012.
2. Capital appreciation of all fancy bank debt
As someone who is fairly bullish on the economy I don’t expect other bank prefs such as NWBD to be yielding 9% in two years time, either. If LLPC were to yield 7% (with ten-year gilts at say 5%) then perhaps 130p per share is a reasonable target. That’s potential upside of 50% over the next couple of years.
3. Lloyds’ near-term outlook looking rosier
Briefly, the Basel 3 announcement this week suggests the new regulations of banks will be less onerous than feared (or warranted, for that matter). Lloyds is tipped by analysts as one of the banks best-positioned to benefit, as it will be able to count its stake in various other business towards its capital requirements. Less onerous capital strictures means more profit for banks, which means better rewards for investors.
4. You never know
Perhaps there will be a fudge that sees the coupon payments restarted before 2012. Two years is a long time in the markets these days.
A portfolio play
Regular readers may recall I recently bought back into Lloyds ordinary shares. So I’ve increased my exposure to Lloyds bank with these LLPC shares.
While superficially weirder, the LLPC shares are much safer than the ordinary shares – so buying these is less risky than loading up on more LLOY stock.
It also diversifies me away from my Natwest preference shares.
Please be aware these LLPC preference shares are riskier than the Natwest preference shares. And it goes without saying they’re far riskier than a savings account or gilts. My exposure to bank preference shares and to Lloyds ordinary shares accordingly only totals about 5% of my portfolio.
There’s a very real risk of losing all your money if you buy LLPC shares, as with any share. A high yield and potential capital gain doesn’t come catch-free.
That said, I’m coming to these instruments late and after the life-changing gains have already been made by braver punters. I think the risk of these bank preference shares being wiped out was reasonable 18 months ago; now the risk is much lower but so are the potential rewards.
Note: New or sensible investors shouldn’t bother with any of this stuff. Buy a tracker or a simple and cheap ETF portfolio instead.
Behavioural finance has moved into the mainstream. In this guest post, Tim from The Psy-Fi Blog gets us up to speed.
Noble Prize winning committees aren’t renowned for consistency. Giving Barack Obama the Peace Prize for not being George W. Bush is a triumph of hope, but hardly based on rational analysis.
We might also wonder if the selection panel got its wires crossed when it awarded the Economics prize to a psychologist.
But it wasn’t just any old shrink who got the bauble. It was Daniel Kahneman, half of the dynamic duo that invented the whole topic of behavioural finance.
The other half, Amos Tversky, died in 1996. Between them, Tversky and Kahneman pump primed a change in the way we expect stocks to behave.
Outside credit rating agencies, it’s no longer enough to assume we can predict market movements on the basis of number crunching on a grand scale.
Now we need to take our own mental confusion into account.
A simple observation that changes everything
The revolution began when Daniel Kahneman noticed how explanations of changes in task performance were based on a mental model that had little to do with actual behaviour.
Airforce flight instructors believed that praising students after a good flight and criticising them after a bad one led to worse performance in the first case and better in the second. But Kahneman theorised that this was simply mean regression in action – that regardless of what the instructors said or did, a poor performance was likely to be followed by a better one and a good performance by a worse one.
This observation kicked off a whole range of discoveries, with ramifications that investors cannot afford to ignore.
In particular, that mean regression might be the underlying principle behind stock movements is an idea that’s been around for over a century – but it hasn’t prevented billions of pounds being made by analysts, gurus, tipsheets, advisers and the whole panoply of apparently omniscient soothsayers that inhabit the securities industry and charge for saying otherwise.
Tversky and Kahneman’s big idea means that this is all an utterly pointless waste of money. Most short-term market movements are simple mean regression in action. It’s only human mental confusion that attributes these random movements to some kind of underlying purpose.
You don’t think like you think you think
As they dug through a series of remarkable experiments, Tversky and Kahneman began to uncover a previously unresearched series of behavioural biases – strange twists in human nature that cause us to act irrationally and against our own interests.
In Judgement Under Uncertainty (1973) they outlined a series of these behaviours. In doing so, they gave birth to behavioural finance.
In essence what they showed was that people don’t act rationally, as defined by correctly calculating the probabilities of events, especially rare ones.
Now you may not think that surprising. After all, we don’t spend our days carefully calculating risks and rewards.
Yet this was exactly the dominant approach of economics at the time – the so-called Efficient Markets Hypothesis, which argues that all information about a stock at any given time is embedded in a single value, the price.
Instead, Kahnemann and Tversky showed that there are regular patterns of irrationality that lie behind people’s behaviour:
- We judge people based on stereotypes.
- We assess the likelihood of events happening based on our ability to retrieve from memory similar events.
- We tend to make decisions based on some arbitrary starting point.
Labeled in turn the representative heuristic, the availability bias and anchoring, these three behaviours do a pretty good job of derailing our attempts to rationalise about investments.
Next came Prospect Theory (1979) – the first attempt at an explanation for the strange asymmetric risk taking behaviour they’d observed.
As other researchers followed up on this research, a whole raft of added behavioural twitches came to light. We are, quite simply, a mass of contradictory and illogical behaviours, to the point where it’s a wonder we can get out of bed in the morning, let alone be trusted with a kettle and a gas hob.
In light of these discoveries, it’s not surprising that most people are advised to abandon attempts to pick individual stocks and simply buy the market via an index tracker instead.
Could behavioural finance be wrong, too?
But there’s another twist in the history of behavioural finance, which is that the uncovering of this unsuspected mental world of confusion has begun to bother some researchers.
They agree that we’re essentially highly-evolved apes with an instinct for survival honed in a very different environment. But they wonder how it’s possible to reconcile the contradictions discovered by psychologists in a way that means we can function at all.
The answer, it seems, is that behavioural finance may also be wrong, although in some very peculiar ways.
Their evidence comes from taking experiments out of the laboratory and into the real world, and also by trying to explain human behaviour using an integrated theory of mental processing that doesn’t look anything like the statistical analyses so beloved of financial researchers.
The economist John List, for example, has been described as the most hated man in economics, largely on account of how his real-world experiments have unpicked a range of the most cherished theories in finance.
List has shown that outside the laboratory people aren’t altruistic in the way they are inside it, and that loss aversion – the idea that people are symmetrically inclined to avoid taking a loss but happy to take a profit based on some arbitrary purchasing anchor point – is not a general psychological principle.
List’s main point that if you put people in a lab experiment they’ll behave the way you expect them to, not the way they’d do naturally (whatever that may be).
You don’t think like they thought you think, either
A second front on behavioural finance has opened up around the way that we actually process information.
Although behavioural finance is superficially very different from the old Efficient Markets approach, underlying it is a similar model of the way that we make decisions, suggesting we perform abstract statistical calculations. Behavioural finance says it’s just that in the behavioural models we get the answers wrong.
But some researchers are now arguing this is a mistaken view of the human brain, and that we do something much simpler, which yields similar results, using an idea known as satisficing.
Satisficing is simply an approach that means we take the best answer we can come up with, given the range of information we have available to us.
Bizarrely the satisficing theories suggests that while a certain amount of information about a certain topic will lead us to improved solutions, beyond this point our decision making accuracy goes down!
If true, it again means there’s a limit to the effectiveness of stock analysis – although that’s still no excuse for simply sticking pins into the price pages of the Financial Times.
Get your head examined
Scientific advance happens one funeral at a time, and resistance to the suggestion that behavioural finance is flawed is fierce. Progress happens only when someone finds a big enough pair of boots to kick down the old barriers.
That’s what Kahneman and Tversky started back in the 1970s, and the former’s Nobel Prize is unlikely to be the last time a psychologist wins the Economics prize.
Investors, meanwhile, should avoid wasting their money on hopeless explanations of future market movements. And if they can’t, perhaps they should go see a shrink instead?
Read more of Tim’s musings over on his Psy-Fi blog.
My Saturday musing, followed by the links.
Weird times call for unusual observations. One of the most poignant I’ve read recently was an article in The Telegraph about jobless Americans heading to the Californian hills like their forefathers did 150 years ago:
David was sure things would work out. Then his savings dwindled and his optimism soon followed.
But, when things looked darkest, he found he had an ace up his sleeve, the same ace thousands of people have been pulling out of their sleeves in the past two years as jobs dried up all over California and something approaching panic seeped through every county of the state. David turned to gold prospecting.
He’d panned over the years as a hobby. But with the downturn came an opportunity he had never anticipated. Just as in the recession of the early Eighties, the inflation crisis of the mid-Seventies and even the Great Depression of the Thirties, David noticed that gold had not only retained its worth – it had actually risen in price.
In fact, its value had shot through the roof – tripling to more than $1,000 (£658) an ounce since the start of the recession. Earlier this month, fears of a ‘double-dip’ prompted claims that bullion could hit nearly $1,500 an ounce.
This story brings together two of the many big themes of the great slump – the hideously high level of unemployment in the US (20% by the old measure, some say) and the ever-upwards ascent of the gold price.
I’ve long been in two minds about gold. Collapsing jewelry demand and jokes about turning cats into gold against a backdrop of soaring gold ETF demand and ever-present gold buggery all smells like a bubble.
But then, the economy has been through extraordinary times, and Central Banks are employing extraordinary measures – so there is a rationale underlying the increase in the gold price.
The difficulty is there’s always a rationale for bubbles. The Internet has changed the world, the railroads did open up America, and tulips… okay, I’m not so sure about tulips.
But when is a rationale stretched beyond breaking point? That’s the real judgment.
As for the other part of the story – unemployment – this has remained stubbornly high. I wrote back in February that unemployment is a lagging indicator, but I must admit there’s a point when persistently high unemployment implies high unemployment in the months to come, too.
That said, now’s not the time to blink. An FT blogger linked too below says nobody foresaw Britain’s strong return to growth, and now GDP is flying at 1.1% a quarter. Well, I did. And as I wrote on Stock Tickle this week, the good news keeps coming.
Actually on re-reading that Stock Tickle post, I see it could come across as a bit of a brag. It isn’t really.
My central belief is that short run economic performance is pretty much unpredictable, and so a lot of it is down to luck. You’re better off buying what seems like good value to you and riding out what the economy throws at you.
I do admit to feeling a tad smug that most people were wrong and I was right, but it’s been the other way around plenty of times before (particularly on UK house prices, where I’ve been bearish for nearly a decade).
No, I’m more happy because of what independent thinking could mean for my investing performance in the long run.
Warren Buffett didn’t get rich by flip-flopping his investments with the latest groundlessly negative opinion columns. And neither will we.
