Читать книгу Behavioral Portfolio Management - C. Thomas Howard - Страница 15

Consider the following allegory:

The finance professor and his student are walking to lunch one day and come upon a $100 bill lying on the sidewalk. The student leans over to pick it up but is restrained by the professor with the admonition “Do not bother to try to pick it up, for if it were real, it would have already been scooped up. So our eyes must be playing tricks on us.” The student responds “With all due respect professor, I do not believe in your rationality model,” then leans over to pick up the bill and stuffs it into his pocket.

Ten years ago I was the professor and now I’m the student picking up the $100 bill and stuffing it in my clients’ pockets.

Behavioral Portfolio Management (BPM) is set in a world in which prices rarely reflect underlying fundamentals – instead they are driven by emotional crowds who are unable or unwilling to release their emotional brakes. BPM focuses on how investors, advisors and asset managers can go about releasing their own emotional brakes and harnessing the behavioral price distortions uncovered by means of careful research.

BPM is based on my research and the research of other behavioral and finance academics, as well as my experience in managing active equity portfolios. Along the way, BPM rejects the rationality-based concepts and methods of Modern Portfolio Theory, the primary tools used by those industry professionals who I will refer to as Cult Enforcers. The most important conclusion of BPM is that building high performance portfolios is surprisingly straightforward but emotionally difficult.