After an explosive move up in January, we were subsequently reminded that stocks (and indexes) can still go down. This is a time when it is especially important to avoid emotional reactions and focus on intelligent decision-making. Here are a few investment thoughts, offered up once before, that might be worth considering.
Simplify
1. Don’t make more predictions than your data can support. A collection of just four or five exchange-traded funds (ETF) is all most people need for a successful retirement account. If you own individual equities then understand the basics: what does the company do, how does it make money from that and what does it do with the profits? Beyond this, short of being a member of the company’s management team, there’s not much else you can know for sure. Assume nothing and avoid the temptation to believe a business is holding a winning lottery ticket. As Warren Buffett once noted, “You should invest in a business that even a fool can run, because someday a fool will.”
Focus on the not-too-distant future
2. Near-term forecasts are more certain than 10-year projections. Remember all of the investment analysts who were predicting a big drop in February with an immediate rebound? Me neither. The future has always been hard to predict and this fact is unlikely to change just because investors wish it would. Always be suspicious of undue emphasis on the long-term, especially when the short-term isn’t looking so good.
Understand your assumptions
3. Be aware of the weakest links in your argument. Without doing this, it is pretty much impossible to know when it is time to exit an investment position. When a key assumption changes, or more likely proves incorrect, it may be best to exit the investment and move on to the next good idea. Put another way, keep a lookout for what you didn’t think about when entering an investment.
Be wary of precision
4. It is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong. Too much detail gives a false sense of security. This explains why successful panhandlers always ask for an exact handout, like sixty-three cents. It’s just human nature to think someone predicting that earnings for the S&P in 2012 will be $107.63 must know more than someone who simply suggests that earnings will be less than $100. Yet a prediction of a range – less than $100 – can prove more helpful in understanding the underlying assumptions, such that the S&P will struggle to achieve growing earnings.
Leave yourself an intellectual paper trail
5. By definition, our memories are terribly biased. During my 13-month experiment as a day trader (using a Scottrade account specifically for this purpose), I kept a spreadsheet documenting every trade, the cost to trade and the profit or loss on every position. While I ended up with about an 8% return (this was way back in 2007, when it was pretty hard to lose money in the markets), the amount of work involved as well as some of the risks assumed, made it obvious that market timing isn’t a good strategy. Being able to revisit the actual data has been a valuable reminder for staying focused on what works for me. I keep remembering how wildly successful I was, a notion difficult to reconcile with the actual data.
