Some of our clients are firm Democrats, some staunch Republicans, and others somewhere in the middle. I have asked many the question who was ‘surprised’ by the 2016 election results. To a person, each one was. Whether you are for the President-Elect or against him is irrelevant to my main point. The following are all facts; We experienced a year of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton never being out of the news. They were the only major candidates and the thousands of media outlets, newscasters and political pundits of all stripes talked incessantly about them. Predictions were clearly laid. And yet…despite that massive exposure and limited choice, WE WERE SURPRISED.
Now let’s extrapolate. Say instead of just 2 CANDIDATE companies to choose to buy stock in, which might be tough enough to decide, let’s say we have 4,000-5,000 (which is the USA stock market sum). That’s a big leap. Everything about those companies that can be known publicly is known…and, according to SEC Regulation FD (“Full Disclosure”), passed October 23, 2000), whatever information that is available from the company must be shared simultaneously. Now let’s take this already seemingly dauntless task of trying to find the right company, at the right price, at the right time, and triple it again. If you are a global investor, which our clients are, the number of companies that must be followed / scrutinized / analyzed / programmatically dissected is another 8,000 (more or less). We like games where the odds of winning are decent, but certainly won’t play them if the game seems beyond winning. If the experts, with legions of people working on it could not figure out who of two would win the Presidential election, what elixir must I drink to provide me the insight into which of these 12,000 companies is right for me to buy or sell?
Now it gets even more complicated. Somehow, despite the great odds set out above, let’s say you picked the right horse and bought stocks. In the days after the 2016 election the USA stock market has gone up – YEAH — but then again not all markets went up in that period. After the election, almost every international equity market (developed and emerging markets) went down. If you instead had elected to invest for ‘safety’ and decided to invest in bonds of different sizes…you’would have been down after the election uniformly across the board with the renewed concern of rising rates. (Though in our client’s case, down only 1-3%[i], vs. the average of 3-5%[ii], because our fixed income portfolio is simply better positioned to withstand unanticipated changes. Thus, on balance clients were still up).
I’ve shared with you the investment philosophy you should follow for maximum probability of success so that you are not surprised or guess wrong. Exactly what is the coming surprise nobody can know, and now you have personal experience that the “experts” also don’t know. What you do know is that over time Stocks do better than Bonds, and Bonds do better than cash. That’s a good bet, that’s a smart bet, and it creates the foundation upon which all our investments with Wellspring are based.
[i] Fund Center, Dimensional Fund Advisors (November 30, 2016)
[ii] Barclays Aggregate and Intermediate TR (Morningstar Performance Summary, December 2, 2016)
