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8 Stock Market Sayings That Should Be Questioned

  
  Education
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8) There is a lot of cash on the sidelines.

There is always a lot of cash on the sidelines and that never changes. The buyer of a stock, thus taking cash off the sidelines, gives it to the seller who puts it back on the sidelines.

7) There are more buyers than sellers (or vice versa).

Maybe technically there are more bodies buying or selling than the other side but the number of shares traded has to be exactly the same as for every share bought is a share sold. It’s the aggressiveness of one side or the other that matters.

6) Stocks are attractive because they aren’t quite as overpriced as bonds.

If bonds are artificially priced, shouldn’t stocks be? Overpriced though can of course remain overpriced.

5) The higher stocks go the more attractive and less risky they are.

For long term investors, the more one pays in price today with respect to valuation, the less return they should expect in the future.

4) Stocks aren’t expensive because they are still cheaper than the valuations seen in March 2000.

Really?

3) There is no alternative.

In bull markets there is always no alternative to common stocks. In bear markets, there are always alternatives.

2) We’re going to get a rotation into stocks and out of bonds.

For every portfolio rotating out of bonds has to see someone rotating in and that buyer of stock has someone rotating out. Again, it’s the aggressiveness of the moves that matter.

1) The selloff in stocks was profit taking.

Does anyone refer to a rally as profit seeking?

Larry Hite on Risk

  
  Education

Some wise views from Larry Hite:

“We don’t really trade silver…we don’t trade the S&P…we trade the differences. We really are risk managers. We take on risks, try to exploit them and we leave when they turn against us. That is what we get paid for. Basically we are in the risk transfer business. We take on what people want to sell, sell what people want to buy and hope to make a profit. The reason why one goes to a portfolio is because there are real limits to perfect knowledge. I’ll give you an example. Say you knew which commodity, stock or currency would appreciate the most in the following year, and you knew exactly what its price would be. We did this experiment looking backwards in fact in our database. The question of when you take a position is how are you going to trade the line…how much of a position are you going to leverage. Now, if you have perfect knowledge, would you leverage 5 to 1, would you leverage 10 to 1, 2 to 1? Well it turns out that if you leverage more than 3 to 1 that you are a loser. Because we found that if you did 3 to 1 you would have, even with perfect knowledge, you could go down a third. So that, the only perfect knowledge you could have, would be if you knew every wiggle on the line. Then you would know exactly how much to leverage. But you don’t.”

Harriman’s New Book of Investing Rules -Book Review

  
Analysis, Education

Harriman’s New Book of Investing Rules: The Do’s & Don’ts of the World’s Best Investors, edited by Christopher Parker, contains over 500 pages of wisdom from 64 noted American and British investors. It’s a smorgasbord of ideas from which the reader can pick and choose. Don’t like Brussel sprouts? Here, have some cheesecake. But, said in a cautionary whisper, you’d be better off with the Brussel sprouts.
I hate to think how many years of successful investing experience are encapsulated in this volume. Probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000. There aren’t too many resources that can claim this much collective experience.
Herewith a tiny sampling of some of the rules, minus the often much more insightful explanation that follows each of them.

Diversify, but not to mediocrity.
Concentrate, but not too much.
Hedge when the market’s expensive and falling.
Unless you are a genius use a system.
Don’t rely too heavily on models.
Beware of geeks bearing formulas.
Demographics are destiny.
Price is the paramount trading signal.
Be happy doing nothing.
Question the persistency of anomalies.
Understand your edge and why it is sustainable.
Review past stupidities, but don’t let them make you timid.
Only bet on one variable at a time.
It’s important that your process does not work in every market environment.
Don’t chop and change too much.
Be patient—fortune sometimes take a while to favor the bold.
Time, not timing, is the key to investment success. The best time to invest, therefore, is now.
Always remember that investing is hard.

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