Читать книгу Active Investing in the Age of Disruption - Evan L. Jones - Страница 24

Investment process is both the key to long-term development as an investor and to creating a firm that can grow without dependence on one individual. Success in the investment management industry is very hard to come by, but even harder to replicate. How can you replicate something that has so many different variables and potential outcomes?

Active investing is a discipline in which being 70% correct is a great track record and in which you can be wrong for the right reasons and right for the wrong reasons. A strategy can look horrible today only to look brilliant a year in the future. The only chance an investor has to honestly judge actions and learn from mistakes and success is to painstakingly create a process of investing that incorporates both security selection and portfolio management. A large part of this process is documentation in the form of an original investment thesis and then regular updates on events that affect the thesis.

To make it even more difficult your process cannot be 100% rigid and static. There are too many unique scenarios, and every investor continues to learn and markets change. The core investment tenets we are discussing may not change, but any completely static process is not growing and evolving. We will discuss where to draw the line between a process that can evolve and become better over time, as opposed to one that is ever-changing and has no foundation.

My conviction in the core investment tenets described not only comes from 20 years of portfolio management experience but also from the opportunity to watch and interact with some of the world's best managers. The investment business is somewhat unusual in that understanding which decision was an error, even in hindsight, is not always readily apparent. It is possible to make the right decision and have a poor result. It is, also, possible to make the wrong decision and be handsomely paid. Some might not call being handsomely paid a wrong decision, but it may be a decision that nine times out of ten will cost you money; you just happened to be lucky in the timing of the investment.

Which experiences are beneficial lessons and which are red herrings?

Individual investment managers do not get the opportunity to analyze a huge dataset of decisions, because there may only be a handful of major decisions made each year.

The conclusions take time to become clear. Major periods of market stress are not very frequent, so the dataset of events to learn from is not large. For this reason, I am very appreciative of having learned not just from my own mistakes but also from watching and talking to the hundreds of global managers that DUMAC has partnered with in the 2010s. My dataset of decisions to analyze and consider has been 100 times what it would have been if I were to have solely managed my own fund and been confined to my experiences.

The next two chapters delve into more detail on the current market environment and the two forces challenging investment decisions today: central bank intervention and technology-driven disruption.