The elusive value of past investment mistakes

Given market gyrations, and oppressive macro newsflow (as we have spelled out in numerous blog commentaries) it seems an appropriate time to offer our community some investment wisdom of the hard-earned variety.

Edward Chancellor penned an article dealing with this, and the opening of Russell Napier's excellent "The Library of Mistakes": The elusive value of past investment mistakes (Edward Chancellor / Russell Napier) (https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/the-elusive-value-of-past-investment-mistakes) "Last week, a new business and finance library opened its doors in Edinburgh’s New Town. The Library of Mistakes https://www.libraryofmistakes.com was named by its founder, the investment strategist Russell Napier, in the fond belief that the study of history can improve financial understanding, as he says, “one mistake at a time.” Appropriately enough Alistair Darling, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer during the global financial crisis of 2008, inaugurated the library. Judging by recent events, investors haven’t learned much from that earth-shattering event. The Library of Mistakes takes as its motto a comment by James Grant that whereas progress in the physical sciences is linear, in finance it is cyclical. As the founder of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer likes to say, “we keep on stepping on the same rakes.” In an ideal world, knowledge of earlier financial debacles would steer investors away from those noisome garden implements. In practice, there’s no substitute for personal experience. Professional investment is a game of trial and error. Mistakes are expensive lessons whose bills, in terms of underperformance, are paid by clients. The best investors learn from their mistakes. Even the most successful are wrong nearly half the time, which gives them plenty of material to dwell upon. A willingness to admit to errors, says Napier, indicates an open mind. Richard Oldfield, an experienced British fund manager, opens his witty and wise book on investment, “Simple But Not Easy https://www.harriman-house.com/simplebutnoteasy2”, with a chapter on his personal howlers. The investment advice imparted by Oldfield’s former employer, the merchant banker Siegmund Warburg, was to “always cry over spilt milk.” Every mistake makes one a fractionally better investor, says Oldfield. George Soros places mistakes at the heart of his investment process. The Hungarian-born billionaire claims to have an acute sense of his own fallibility. “To others, being wrong is a source of shame,” Soros wrote. “To me recognising my mistakes is a source of pride. Once we realise that imperfect understanding is the human condition, there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.” Soros’s approach as a hedge fund manager was to first establish a position and then consider how he might be wrong. In his view, the recognition and rectification of mistakes constitute the hard job of investing. The rest is a cinch. The opening of the new library was accompanied by a weeklong “Festival of Mistakes”. At one event, seasoned investors discussed their career-defining blunders. Former emerging markets fund manager Angus Tulloch confessed that he’d failed to anticipate the disruption that the internet would bring to so many businesses and advised younger investors to spend at least 15 minutes a day writing down their mistakes. Another retired investor admitted to owning a large stake in Northern Rock when the British mortgage lender collapsed in 2007. His mistake was not to have considered what would happen to the bank if wholesale money markets dried up. He compounded the error by failing to sell when Northern Rock first alerted shareholders to its funding problems. When an investment thesis is exposed as fundamentally flawed, it’s never a good idea to tarry. “Leverage and illiquidity are the kiss of death,” writes Oldfield, citing a former colleague. Yet too many investors ignored this sound advice in the years before the global financial crisis. They also turned a blind eye to frothy conditions in the U.S. housing market, just as, a few years earlier, they’d ignored sky-high stock market valuations. Another age-old blunder involves attempting to enhance returns by taking excessive risk at times of abnormally low interest rates. Wall Street created securities backed by subprime mortgages to meet investors’ demand for extra yield after the Federal Reserve led by Alan Greenspan adopted its easy money policy at the turn of the century. There’s scant evidence the disastrous errors revealed by the financial crisis imparted any lasting lessons. In fact, most recent high-profile investment disasters involve some mixture of illiquidity and excessive leverage. In 2019, the British investor Neil Woodford shut up shop after an outsized bet on unlisted securities meant his investment firm couldn’t meet redemption requests from clients. A year earlier, a fixed income fund run by GAM closed after investors became concerned about its exposure to illiquid securities. Meanwhile, investors have been using leverage to enhance returns like never before. U.S. margin debt soared during the market frenzy of the past couple of years. Last year, Archegos Capital Management, a family office run by former hedge fund manager Bill Hwang, collapsed after making extremely leveraged bets on a handful of American and Chinese listed companies. Archegos’s failure cost its lenders around $10 billion. Hwang last month pleaded not guilty to U.S. criminal changes that he lied to the banks and used derivatives to manipulate share prices. Nor have investors paid much attention of late to market valuations. At the start of this year, U.S. stocks were trading at their highest multiple of earnings, adjusted for the economic cycle, since the dot-com bust of 2000. Shares in cloud computing companies, special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), and anything to do with electric vehicles soared into the stratosphere. Walter Bagehot’s comment that the “good times … of high price almost always engender much fraud” seems apt for the frantic activity in SPACs and cryptocurrencies. Why have investors learnt so little from past errors? The obvious answer lies in human nature. There may be no permanent laws of investment, Napier says, but our mistakes are eternal. Professional investors are forced to keep up with the crowd, despite their better judgment. As they say on Wall Street, to be early is to be wrong. Meanwhile, the extraordinary monetary policies of recent years have helped to induce a kind of collective amnesia in financial markets. Zero interest rates boosted market valuations and created a most desperate search for yield among investors. Easy money also encouraged excessive leverage. Now interest rates are rising and the errors of the recent market frenzy are being exposed. In due course they will be written up, providing more volumes to that ever-expanding institution, the Library of Mistakes." Don't be upset about the dig at cryptocurrencies, being a zealot about an investment is not a road to success but can be a highway to poverty - we should always look to challenge our views, to stress test them (which is one of the more useful takeaways from the above article). What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger! We are obviously fans of the space, and we see huge growth, innovation, and interaction. Sure there will be fallout, there always is in such dynamic spaces, and it's actually a very healthy trait. One thing we have consistently said whether it be in these blog commentaries, or our WP, is that cryptocurrencies have proved thus far to be an excellent speculative asset, and that is not a derogatory comment, especially when the interconnectedness and utility of the cryptoverse is growing so strongly. The trend is your friend, things are only going to continue to move from the tangible to digital. However, there is no proof that cryptocurrencies represent a store of value, a non-correlating (highly portable) hedge. We have now changed that dynamic forever ..... FIX00 is digitalising real-world rubies, proven stores of value for centuries, and offering them to the public via our utility token and importantly our forthcoming F-NFT platform which allows for the ownership and transfer of their value. These unique assets should be an important part of your defensive armour as volatility and downside risks increase. All aboard the Digital Ruby train ...... Whoo, Whoo ....... leaving platform one on May 6th ..... All aboard!

For a short overview of the FIX00 project 🙂 please use this link: The Start of something new

If you still have questions, we are happy to have you join us. We take great pride in our company and the revolutionary change it heralds. Please feel free to contact us if you need further information or have further questions:: Contact Us

If you don’t want to miss out and are ready to buy NOW, please CLICK here: Coinsbit

The future is filled with promises for us all. We're glad you're with us.

We look forward to growing together: