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I'm Too Risk-Averse for Index Investing

paranoidvalueinvestor.substack.com

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Re: I'm Too Risk-Averse for Index Investing

#21
post #5

Makes you wonder why the 89% of fund managers that fail to beat the market don't just pick "value" stocks.

Because back-testing is really easy to pick value stocks, forward picking is really hard.

(Fun fact I've heard, funds beat the indices before expenses but fail after expenses ...)

Re: I'm Too Risk-Averse for Index Investing

#22
post #16

You can't look at a chart of an index price and simply say "it's down from the peak, I would have lost money". If you do that, you are forgetting that stocks pay dividends, and they aren't included in the index price. Instead, you should be looking at index tracking fund / ETF prices, which will include the value of dividends (and also account for fees).

100%. European markets are known to pay out more dividends whereas the US market is known to prioritize stock price growth. Return-wise that makes no theoretical difference.

Don't know why you're being downvoted; everything you've stated is true. I would just add that one should probably account for taxes. When taxes are involved: buybacks >> dividends.

Re: I'm Too Risk-Averse for Index Investing

#23
Reading the Intelligent Investor, it is striking to see how many stocks there were with a P/E ratio under 15 and with sound financials and that paid good dividends, I.e. a value stock, in the 1950s, when the book was written. If you try to apply the value investing principles today, you will end up spending an inordinate amount of time looking for a stock like this. The risk of an index fund is less than the amount of dedicated time you would need to spend to practice value investing.

Re: I'm Too Risk-Averse for Index Investing

#25
The part of the argument made by looking at individual countries is much less compelling in a world where low cost total world stock etfs exist.

They are of course weighted heavily to the US just given the size of US stocks, but one can reduce that exposure by buying low cost regional etfs or even just total world ex-US.

That seems like a better risk averse approach (possibly with some allocation to a total bond etf depending on your time horizon) than trying to pick individual value stocks.

Re: I'm Too Risk-Averse for Index Investing

#26

You can't look at a chart of an index price and simply say "it's down from the peak, I would have lost money". If you do that, you are forgetting that stocks pay dividends, and they aren't included in the index price. Instead, you should be looking at index tracking fund / ETF prices, which will include the value of dividends (and also account for fees).

Raw mutual NAVs and ETF prices do not include dividends, and prices fall on ex-dividend dates, but you can often find dividend-adjusted NAVs and prices that do incorporate them.

Re: I'm Too Risk-Averse for Index Investing

#27
Michael Burry has two main points against index funds: 1) large-scale passive investing has deteriorated the price discovery mechanism for index funds and 2) there's a liquidity risk because trillions of dollars are linked to stocks in index funds that only have hundreds of millions of trade volume. So if there's a cascading failure, as smarter money realizes the price is wrong and begins to exit, there will be no buyers and the majority of index fund holders will be holding the bag.

Re: I'm Too Risk-Averse for Index Investing

#28

Reading the Intelligent Investor, it is striking to see how many stocks there were with a P/E ratio under 15 and with sound financials and that paid good dividends, I.e. a value stock, in the 1950s, when the book was written. If you try to apply the value investing principles today, you will end up spending an inordinate amount of time looking for a stock like this. The risk of an index fund is less than the amount o…

> the risk... is less than the... time

You're comparing two different units here.

You might say "the trade off of value investing to reduce risk is a huge investment of time."

Re: I'm Too Risk-Averse for Index Investing

#29
post #3

Averse. It's risk averse.

Both adverse and averse are used to indicate opposition. Adverse, usually applied to things, often means "harmful" or "unfavorable" and is used in instances like "adverse effects from the medication." Averse usually applies to people and means "having a feeling of distaste or dislike." It is often used with to or from to describe someone having an aversion to something specific, such as "he is averse to taking risks"…

I appreciate that you're trying to be charitable to the author, but this sounds more like a retroactive justification than a new and valid usage.

Yes, I know that plenty of our words today evolved out of mistakes, solecisms, misspellings, etc. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't at least try to be kind-of correct.

Re: I'm Too Risk-Averse for Index Investing

#30

You can't look at a chart of an index price and simply say "it's down from the peak, I would have lost money". If you do that, you are forgetting that stocks pay dividends, and they aren't included in the index price. Instead, you should be looking at index tracking fund / ETF prices, which will include the value of dividends (and also account for fees).

And just a clarification that some (many) ETFs also distribute dividends on a quarterly basis as they accrue them from their holdings, so technically you want to be looking at the total return indices.
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