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Over the longer term, investors expect a positive, after inflation return from investing in company shares and lending money to governments and companies by owning bonds.  Unfortunately – and inescapably – in the shorter-term market returns are anything but predictable. They contain a lot of noise, as the market absorbs new information into prices.  High inflation in 2022 led to a rapid rise in interest rates around the world, contributing, in part, to the fall in global bond and equity prices. It was a painful backward step and a reminder that the road to long-term returns can be bumpy and painful at times. With these now higher yields, some investors may have been tempted to hold more cash but roll forward a year and that would have been a poor decision in the short term.  It is nearly always a bad decision in the long term for those with long investment horizons.  Fortunately, 2023 has delivered a much more positive story.

Looking Backwards

Last year all core assets delivered positive returns. The US market – and in particular the ‘Magnificent Seven’ as the press have dubbed the big tech firms – regained the losses they suffered in 2022.  In fact, they contributed around three quarters of the return of the US market over the year.  As a consequence, global developed market returns were very strong, given that the US weight in global markets is around 63%. Value companies underperformed in the US (largely because of the overwhelming impact of the ‘Magnificent Seven’) but made a strong contribution outside the US.  Both value and smaller companies outperformed strongly in emerging markets. Global commercial property (REITs) also managed a positive return.

On the defensive side of portfolios, high quality, short-dated bonds have recouped over half of the falls suffered in 2022 – largely on account of the higher bond yields, which caused the pain in 2022 – delivering returns similar to cash.

Figure 1: Global investment returns – 2022 and 2023 compared

Data: Funds used to represent asset classes, in GBP. See endnote for details.

Sensible, systematic portfolios comprising a diversified ‘growth’ basket of equities – with tilts to value and smaller companies – paired with ‘defensive’ short dated high-quality bonds will have delivered robust returns in 2023, somewhere in the region of 9% for a 60/40 split respectively in GBP terms[1]. Investors with portfolios denominated in GBP suffered a small currency drag over the year as Sterling appreciated against the US Dollar by around 4%, as well as most other major currencies.  Year-on-year inflation in the UK fell to 3.9% in November, down from 10.5% at the start of the year.

Looking at three-year cumulative returns helps to illustrate the benefit of remaining invested through tough years such as 2022. Bond returns have been poor due to starting yields around 0% at the start of the period followed by subsequent yield rises (and thus bond price falls), but these were more than compensated for by strong growth asset returns.

[1] Refer to table in the endnote for underlying funds and allocations.  This is provided for informational insight only and does not represent any form of advice or recommendation.

Figure 2: Cumulative global investment returns – three years to the end of 2023.

Data: Funds used to represent asset classes, in GBP. See endnote for details.

Looking Forwards

The outlook for the global economy looks a little bleak as major economies teeter on the brink of recession, including the UK.  China has deep and wide economic problems that are restraining its growth prospects.  Inflation has come down in the EU (2.4%), US (3.1%) and UK (3.9%) from recent double digit highs.  Risks remain – including conflict in the Middle East impacting energy and supply chains –and the final yards to reach central bank target levels of inflation (2% in the UK) will be harder to achieve and vulnerable to geopolitical risks.  Interest rates may well remain elevated relative to the low rates that investors experienced up until early 2022, which is good for bond holders.

It is useful to remember that forward-looking views are already reflected in today’s prices.  What comes next, no-one truly knows. The key is to remain highly diversified, resolute in the face of any market set-backs and focused on long-term goals.

And finally…

More broadly, Putin continues to wage his illegal and brutal war in Ukraine and the terrible humanitarian tragedy unfolding in Gaza seems to have no resolution in sight. Our thoughts are with all the innocent people caught up in these conflicts.

This year we face the prospect of elections in democracies such as the UK, US, Taiwan, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and within the European Union.  US politics is as deeply partisan as it has ever been, raising the level of uncertainty about the future.  The democratic process is always combative, often messy and sometimes ugly.  Let us hope that these elections result in governments that fulfil Lincoln’s wish set out in his Gettysburg Address after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863:

‘that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’  

In the UK, it is certainly possible that the Conservatives will struggle to remain in government.  As Churchill once said:

‘Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’

Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947 

On a brighter note, it is worth remembering that despite the conflicts in the world, seeming discourse in democratic nations and the rise of autocratic and despotic leaders, the world we live in is better in many respects than ever before.  While 659 million of the world’s population live in poverty, this is down from 1.9 billion in 1990 and 902 million in 2012[1].  Global under-5 mortality has dropped by 60%, 2.1 billion people have gained access to safe drinking water since 2000 and today 40% of board seats in FTSE 350 companies are held by women (10 years ago 150 or so of these companies had no women on their boards)[2].  These lesser known facts are a strongly positive counterbalance to the immediate troubles that the world faces.

From an investing perspective, we remain hopeful for the best in 2024 but remain prepared for the worst, as is always prudent.

Happy New Year!

[1] https://borgenproject.org/victories-fighting-poverty/

[2] Sunday Times magazine, December 31, 2023. ‘Really, actually, properly excellent things that happened in 2023’

Risk warnings

This article is distributed for educational purposes and should not be considered investment advice or an offer of any security for sale. This article contains the opinions of the author but not necessarily the Firm and does not represent a recommendation of any particular security, strategy, or investment product.  Information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable but is not guaranteed.

Past performance is not indicative of future results and no representation is made that the stated results will be replicated.

Data series used:

More information is available on request.

Charlie Munger, the lifetime business partner of Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway, passed away in late November at the ripe old age of 99.  He was a deep thinker about business, who focused on the fundamental strengths of companies exhibiting a simplicity that he could understand.  Although he was less high profile than Warren Buffett, he is credited with changing Buffet’s approach of buying ‘fair companies at wonderful prices’ to buying ‘wonderful companies at fair prices’.

He and Buffett delivered investors with stellar returns of +10% above the S&P500 index (1964-2022) [1], although the past two decades have been far more challenging, delivering the return of the market.  He amassed great personal wealth through the investment returns of Berkshire Hathaway [2] – compounded over a long period of time – but gave the majority of it away to philanthropic works.   In tribute, we look at a number of his well-known quotes.

Make yourself into the person you want to be.

A key driver of his personal philosophy was deciding on the person you want to be and then making sure that you become that person.  He summed this up nicely as follows.

Early on, write your desired obituary — and then behave accordingly.

He was also focused on lifelong learning. He and Buffet both read voraciously every day and set aside time for thinking as opposed to doing.  His advice was to go to bed smarter than when you woke up.

His thoughts on investing

His take on investing was that it was a long-term game where you make your choices, have the courage of your convictions, stick with it through thick and thin, and reap the rewards of time and compounding, avoiding emotional and financial costs along the way. Sounds familiar!

A lot of people with high IQs are terrible investors because they’ve got terrible temperaments. And that is why we say that having a certain kind of temperament is more important than brains. You need to keep raw irrational emotion under control. You need patience and discipline and an ability to take losses and adversity without going crazy. You need an ability to not be driven crazy by extreme success.

(Charles T. Munger, Value Investing: A Value Investor’s Journey Through the Unknown.)

Understanding both the power of compound interest and the difficulty of getting it is the heart and soul of understanding a lot of things.

(Poor Charlie’s Almanack)

His reference to ‘getting it’ includes financial and emotional cost leakage, not least chasing returns and trying to time markets, instead of sticking to a well-thought-out strategy.

When he and Buffet began their relationship at Berkshire in the 1960s the investing world was very different, with many more retail investors and fewer sophisticated institutional investors.

There is so much money now in the hands of so many smart people all trying to outsmart one another. It’s a radically different world from the world we started in.

(2023 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting)

The implication is that markets are probably more efficient, meaning that bargains are far rarer for active managers.  Berkshire’s size, and the greater efficiency of markets, has probably underpinned their more lackluster performance in the past two decades.

Even back in 1994, he saw that the investment management industry had become a factory churning out glistening products that appealed to the investment magpies, particularly faddish products designed to chase yesterday’s returns.

I think the reason why we got into such idiocy in investment management is best illustrated by a story that I tell about the guy who sold fishing tackle. I asked him, ‘My God, they’re purple and green. Do fish really take these lures?’ And he said, ‘Mister, I don’t sell fish.’

(A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom as It Relates To Investment Management & Business, 1994 speech at USC Business School)

Today, there are over three million (yes, that is correct!) indices available to investors and more equity mutual funds available than there are listed companies in the world.  This is the ‘idiocy’ to which he refers.  In reality, a sensible, systematic approach to investing requires only a handful of funds to capture market exposures and make evidence-based, long-term risk factor tilts.

One fundamental difference between Charlie Munger’s approach to investment and that of a systematic investor relates to diversification.

The worshipping at the altar of diversification, I think that is really crazy…I find it much easier to find four or five investments where I have a pretty reasonable chance of being right that they’re way above average. I think it’s much easier to find five than it is to find 100. I think the people who argue for all this diversification — by the way, I call it ‘diworsification’ — which I copied from somebody — and I’m way more comfortable owning two or three stocks which I think I know something about and where I think I have an advantage.

(2021 Daily Journal Annual Meeting [3])

At one level he is right.  Long-term market returns are driven by just a handful of stocks.  Research suggest that around 4% of US companies have driven all of the returns of the US market since 1926 [4].  At another level, for most investors he is probably not right, even if it was right for him.  The challenge for investors is picking these stocks.  Perhaps in a time when markets were less efficient and with two deep, investment obsessed investors working on the problem, then finding at least a few of these companies may have been possible.  But for the vast majority of investors, the only way they can guarantee to pick these winning firms is to own the entire market.  The cost of getting it wrong is too big to contemplate and few have the time, insight and fortitude to risk doing so.  As his partner Warren Buffett once said:

By periodically investing in an index fund, for example, the know-nothing investor can actually out-perform most investment professionals. Paradoxically, when ‘dumb’ money acknowledges its limitations, it ceases to be dumb.

(Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter 1993.)

Charlie Munger will be remembered as one of the great ‘active’ investors and a man of humility and integrity. People like him are few and far between.

Charlie Munger (1924-2023)

[1] https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2022ltr.pdf

[2] At the time of his death his shares in Berkshire Hathaway were worth US$2.6 billion but the records show that at one point he owned shares worth in excess of US$10 billion, sales of which have funded his philanthropic endeavours.

[3]      The newspaper publishing company he chaired from 1977 through 2022

[4]      Bessembinder, H. (2018) Do stocks outperform Treasury bills? Journal of Financial. Economics, vol. 129, no. 3, 440–457. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.JFINECO.2018.06.004

If you have any questions or queries about anything in relation to the nature of this blogpost, you can contact info@pacem-advisory.com.

Everyone has been touched by the horrific events and unfolding human tragedy in Israel and the Gaza Strip, and many are concerned by how this might escalate into a wider conflict at a time of great uncertainty in the world. People’s immediate focus is, rightly, on the plight of those caught up – either directly or indirectly – in the maelstrom of the conflict. We can only hope that some form of peaceful solution can be arrived at quickly, however hard or unlikely this may seem.

At such a time, it may feel a little inappropriate to be worried about the impact of ongoing events on investors and their portfolios.  Yet, with many people feeling a great degree of uncertainty about the geopolitical events around the world, the cost of living crisis, the state of politics in many countries, not least the UK and the US, providing some reassurance may be welcome.

In the days since the weekend’s tragic events, the Israeli stock market has fallen by around 7%, in part due to the fall in the Israeli currency (the shekel).  From a portfolio allocation perspective, the Israeli equity market (classified as a developed market) is only around 0.15%[1] of the world equity markets (developed and emerging markets combined).  As such, any direct impact from the Israeli stock market will be negligible in a well-diversified portfolio.  So far, other asset classes have not been materially affected. That is the easy part.

Figure 1:  Asset class returns from 06-10-2023 to 11-10-2023

Morningstar Direct © All rights reserved. See footnote for data uses[2]. In GBP terms.

The hard part is trying to evaluate what the possible geopolitical, economic and investment market scenarios are that lie ahead and the likelihood that they might occur.  At this point, the human mind (not least those of market commentators) tends to work overtime, trying to make sense of the vast interconnected nature of possible outcomes, by making up plausible stories.  These tend to be in the form of conditional probability narratives starting with ‘If A happens, then the impact on B could be material, which could lead to C falling’.  (In one possible scenario A = oil price rise, B = higher inflation, C = bond prices).  Worrying news headlines can ensue.  The question is, what can one do with such information? The truthful answer is not very much.

Fortunately, systematic investors with relatively long horizons can largely ignore these narratives and rely on the fact that they are all, in aggregate, already reflected in today’s market prices.  Unless an investor has better information (or uses information better than others) they should probably not try to outguess markets at a time like this and remain sensibly invested in their long-term strategy.

Things could end up worse than expected and equity markets might fall.  No-one knows.  There could be a flight to safe haven assets such as US Treasuries which would force yields down and bond prices up.  Again, no-one knows.  What investors with highly diversified portfolios do know, however, is that the countries, sectors and individual companies they own are many and varied and the bonds they hold are generally pretty defensive.  This broad diversification should see them through any investment storms that they might encounter, today or in the future, as it has done successfully over the decades. As the chart below shows, investors who remain invested should be rewarded over time.

Figure 2: Global equities and world events Aug 1998 to 11 Oct 2023

Data: Morningstar Direct © All rights reserved – Global equities – Vanguard Global Stock index $ Acc. In GBP

The key is not to make any emotionally driven decisions – perhaps influenced by media headlines or your own narratives – and to remain invested.  If necessary, get in touch with your adviser who will be happy to talk things through with you.

We hope for better times ahead for everyone.

Risk warnings

This article is distributed for educational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or an offer of any security for sale. This article contains the opinions of the author but not necessarily the Firm and does not represent a recommendation of any particular security, strategy, or investment product.  Reference to specific products is made only to help make educational points and does not constitute any form or recommendation or advice. Information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable but is not guaranteed.

Past performance is not indicative of future results and no representation is made that the stated results will be replicated.

If you have any questions or queries about anything in relation to the nature of this blogpost, you can contact info@pacem-advisory.com.

[1]     Based on its allocation in the iShares MSCI ACWI ETF USD Acc

[2]      Using product data as proxies: iShares MSCI Israel ETF, Vanguard FTSE Emerging Markets ETF, Vanguard FTSE Developed Markets ETF, iShares UK Gilts 0-5yr ETF GBP.  Other: Brent Crude – NYMEX: BZW00, US/GBP Yahoo! Finance.

It is sometimes easy to forget that when markets rise and fall, we are looking at this through an aggregated, market-capitalisation weighted lens.  In reality, the fortunes of individual companies and even sectors may be quite disparate over both the short and longer terms.  Take a look at the figure below that illustrates just how widely dispersed US stock outcomes have been year-to-date 2023 (to the end of April).  The S&P 500[1] is up by around 9% in USD terms (4% in GBP terms as Sterling has strengthened against the US dollar).

In the first quarter of 2023, the top ten contributors to performance accounted for 90% of the market rise, with Apple, Microsoft and Nvidia contributing to half of the rise.  Yet in 2022 the top ten companies by size collectively fell 37% compared to the market fall of around 18%[2].

Figure 1: Individual US stock returns differ widely (YTD to 30/4/23)

Note: (1) This represents the return of the Vanguard S&P500 ETF in USD. Holdings data from Morningstar Direct © All rights reserved.

A combination of recency and hindsight biases can tempt the unwary into thinking that it is easy to pick stocks (e.g. ‘It was obvious that Meta would rebound after last year’s plummet in share price!’). Nothing could be further from the truth.

Active investors – who aim to beat the market through their stock-picking skills – see charts like the one above and lick their lips at the opportunities they offer.  Yet they are not guaranteed to beat the market, or even deliver the market return.

Passive investors on the other hand – who believe that markets work well incorporating all public information into prices – see the dangers of picking the wrong stocks and missing out on the returns that market, in aggregate, delivers. They can, more-or-less, capture the market return with a high degree of certainty.

A research paper in 2018 titled ‘Do stocks outperform treasury bills?’[3] had the remarkable effect of being claimed by both the active and passive sides of the investing debate as evidence as to why their approach is valid. He identified that the US$32 trillion of wealth created between 1926 and 2015 in the US market, was entirely generated by the top 1,000 companies, or put another way, less than 4% of the total number of companies that had existed on the US stock exchanges. A follow-up paper[4] focusing on non-US markets found that over 60% of all stocks failed to deliver a return higher than US T-bills and less than 1% of companies delivered all of the wealth creation from 1990 to 2018. The author states (in his original paper):

‘Not only does diversification reduce the variance of portfolio returns, but non-diversified portfolios are subject to the risk that they will fail to include the relatively few stocks that, ex-post, generate large cumulative returns. Indeed the results help to understand why active strategies, which tend to be poorly diversified, most often lead to underperformance.’

The challenge of structuring a highly active, concentrated portfolio to attempt to identify and capture the returns of these few wealth generating firms is immense, and at risk of both hubris and a lack of humility around the power of the collective market view (‘it’s all in the price’). The active management industry’s track record of delivering on its promise to beat the market is well-documented and extremely poor, with over 95% failing to do so over a twenty year period[5].

For those who accept that markets work, they can simply capture the market return through a low-cost, highly diversified systematic fund (of which index funds are a subset).

As the late, great John C. Bogle, the founder of Vanguard liked to say:

‘Don’t look for the needle, buy the haystack!’

Risk warnings

This article is distributed for educational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or an offer of any security for sale. This article contains the opinions of the author but not necessarily the Firm and does not represent a recommendation of any particular security, strategy, or investment product.  Reference to specific products is made only to help make educational points. Information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable but is not guaranteed.

Past performance is not indicative of future results and no representation is made that the stated results will be replicated.

[1]      This represents the return of the Vanguard S&P500 ETF in USD

[2]      Nasdaq, (2023) Top 10 Names in S&P 500 Responsible for 90% of Q1 Gains, April 05. https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/top-10-names-in-sp-500-responsible-for-90-of-q1-gains

[3]      Bessembinder, H. (2018) Do stocks outperform Treasury bills? Journal of Financial Economics, vol. 129, no. 3, 440–457. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.JFINECO.2018.06.004

[4]      Bessembinder, H. (Hank), Chen, T.-F., Choi, G. and Wei, K.-C. (John). (2019), Do global stocks outperform US treasury bills? SSRN Electronic Journal.  https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.3415739

[5]      SPIVA | S&P Dow Jones Indices. (2022) https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/research-insights/spiva/spiva-library/