Читать книгу Behavioral Portfolio Management - C. Thomas Howard - Страница 16

I began my career steeped in the concepts of MPT. Early on, I was able to release my emotional brakes to the point of being able to concentrate my investment portfolio in the $20 investment (i.e. 100% allocation to equities). For many years I continued to believe that hiring an active equity manager was the triumph of hope over reality, so I invested in equity index funds rather than in actively managed funds. More recently, my ideas began to change, based on my research and the research of others, and I am now a strong believer in active management.

In July 2002 I began managing what has become AthenaInvest’s flagship concentrated stock portfolio, Athena Pure Valuation/Profitability, earning a nearly 25% compound annual return over a 12-year time period. During 2013, it produced a greater than 60% return. One needs to remain humble whenever reporting results like these, since, as 2002 Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University reminds us, “reversion to the mean can be just around the corner.”

But I am encouraged that we are heading in the right direction in that our other portfolios, among them mutual fund allocation, equity dividend, ETF, hedge fund, and global tactical ETF, are all producing superior returns. Like Pure, each portfolio is based on harnessing behavioral factors that have been identified through careful research as measurable and persistent emotionally-driven price distortions.

We do not attempt to out-analyze or outsmart other professional investors by creating a superior information mosaic for the investments we make. Instead, we attempt to understand the emotional crowds that dominate market pricing and, in managing our portfolios, exercise the consistency and persistence necessary to earn superior returns. In short, we practice BPM.

At first I was rather surprised by my portfolio performance. But as I conducted additional research and carefully reviewed the finance literature, I found that building a successful portfolio is not uncommon within the industry and the way in which I had been managing Pure is very similar to the way others who are successful manage their portfolios. Thus over time my methodology became embedded in a broader research stream which I will report on in the remainder of this book. The rest of this chapter is devoted to the foundational concepts underlying BPM.