How much can you make in stocks? Realistic Expectations (ICMA Retirement Corporation)

Charts of the Week

Capital Markets Review (As of 9/30/2015)

Chart of the Week for October 2, 2015 - October 8, 2015

Capital market returns were generally negative in the third quarter of 2015, with the exception of U.S. Bonds which had slightly positive returns as U.S interest rates fell during the quarter. Over the trailing 1-year period, U.S. Bonds and U.S. Small-Cap Stocks provided positive returns while International Developed Market Stocks, Emerging Market Stocks, U.S Large-Cap Stocks, and U.S. High Yield Bonds all had negative returns. Over the trailing 5-year period, all asset classes shown except Emerging Market Stocks had positive returns, with U.S. Large- and Small-Cap Stocks outperforming the other asset classes shown.

While U.S. economic reports were generally positive for the third quarter, the negative returns for the asset classes shown above can be related to several factors including market volatility, concerns over economic conditions in China, and U.S. interest rate policy. Emerging Market Stocks was the worst performer in U.S. dollar terms, losing 17.90%. U.S. Small-Cap Stocks lost 11.92%, International Developed Market Stocks lost 10.23%, U.S. Large-Cap Stocks lost 6.44%, and U.S. High Yield Bonds lost 4.86%. U.S. Bonds was the only asset class with positive returns noted on the chart for the quarter, wtih a return of 1.23%.

In the chart above:

• U.S. Bonds are represented by the Barclays U.S. Aggregate Bond Index.
• U.S. High Yield Bonds are represented by the Barclays U.S. Corporate High Yield Index.
• U.S. Large-Cap Stocks are represented by the S&P 500 Index.
• U.S. Small-Cap Stocks are represented by the Russell 2000 Index.
• International Developed Market Stocks are represented by the MSCI EAFE (Net) Index.
• Emerging Market Stocks are represented by the MSCI Emerging Markets (Net) Index.

Where Are We Compared to Other Bear Markets (from dshort.com)

Some historical perspective

Investor Psychology - Common Traps

APRIL 5, 2009, 8:04 P.M. ET FUNDAMENTALS OF INVESTING

Avoiding the Bear Traps

People's emotions lead them to make bad financial moves in chaotic times. Here's what to look out for.
Article

»By SUZANNE MCGEE
In a chaotic bear market like this one, it's easy for investors to fall into traps.

They might scramble to make trades based on the latest news reports. They might search for a miracle stock that will pay off big and let them recoup all their losses. Or they might go in the other direction -- and get so scared of the market that they don't make any moves at all.

I believe that the frequency of irrational investor behavior goes up along with market volatility," says Chris Blum, head of the U.S. behavioral-finance group for JP Morgan Funds in New York, which studies how people's emotions affect their financial decisions.

Fortunately, a bit of logic and common sense will keep you clear of these pitfalls. Here's a look at some common missteps -- and how to avoid them.

THE VALUE TRAP: A chaotic market makes it easier for investors to convince themselves that because a stock -- or a sector or a market -- is cheap, it's a great value. Sometimes, though, there's a good reason that a stock or sector is cheap: It's in trouble. You need to look past the share price or valuation and examine the fundamentals of the company, the industry and the economy before you decide that something is a bargain.

"Within industries, not all companies are created equal; some will fare better than others," says Mr. Blum. It's through research, not instinct or stock price, that investors discover the real values, he adds.



THE RISK TRAP: One reason investors are so vulnerable to the value trap is that another force is at work -- the urge to recoup losses. Investors who are desperate to make back some of what they have lost and return to "normal" are more willing to take outsize bets on individual stocks or narrowly focused exchange-traded funds.

But that approach is even more unlikely to work in this market environment; the combination of the credit crunch and the recession have made the stock market dangerously volatile. A concentrated portfolio is especially risky, advisers argue.

Investors can't accept that individual stocks, or stocks overall, aren't likely to deliver a reliable stream of double-digit profits each year as in the past, says Bill Schultheis, a partner at Soundmark Wealth Management LLC, a financial-planning firm in Kirkland, Washington.

To combat the risk trap, Mr. Schultheis spends a lot of time preaching the virtues of investment basics like diversification and building returns steadily through compound interest and dividends.

THE SCAPEGOAT TRAP: Like the children in humorist Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, people believe they are all above average -- at investing. Overconfidence makes it easy to blame your financial adviser for your outsize losses last year, and to think you'd be better off making the big decisions yourself.

But that attitude ignores a basic fact: In this market, nearly everyone is in the same boat, more or less, regardless of who's managing their money. Ditching your professional help and going it alone is a bad idea.

"There are certainly some financial advisers out there who weren't good at what they did, but the worst mistake someone can make is to fire that individual and decide to do it all themselves instead of finding someone better," says Mr. Blum.

The reality, he says, is that few investors have the time, patience or expertise needed to develop asset-allocation plans and manage diversified portfolios. "Firing a specific adviser may be rational; deciding to be your own financial adviser probably isn't," he says.

THE PARALYSIS TRAP: The market debacle has left many investors too terrified to act at all, whether to sell portfolio holdings to limit losses or take advantage of what may be appealing long-term investment opportunities. Some advisers report clients in their 30s and early 40s shunning stocks altogether, when the real risk that they face is likely to be inflation -- which may eat up their money if they keep it out of riskier investments that are likely to trounce rising inflation rates over the next decade or two.

"The chance of suffering more pain is so intense that they can't imagine a world that will be better," says Joe Sheehan, a partner at Moneta Group, a wealth-management firm in St. Louis. "Two years ago, they would have jumped at the chance to buy more of stocks they already owned at these low prices; now they are frozen in place and won't respond."

Mr. Sheehan tries to persuade clients of a simple fact: The world hasn't changed dramatically enough to justify paralysis. "About 92% of Americans are still employed; the S&P 500 is not going to zero," he says.

Mr. Sheehan finds himself pointing to psychological studies showing that people tend to rely too heavily on what has happened in the recent past when it comes to predicting the future. "That's one reason we're in this mess in the first place," he says.

Among other things, he notes, investors and homeowners believed that housing prices could only go up -- leading to the bubble that got millions of homeowners in horrible financial trouble.

THE COMFORT TRAP: "When people are fearful, Wall Street comes out with a product that tries to make you feel good by promising you safety," says Andrew Mehalko, chief investment officer of GenSpring Family Offices LLC in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.

For instance, Mr. Mehalko expects one of the hottest-selling products this year to be principal-protected notes, just as they were after the bear market of 2001-02. While these vehicles -- which promise to preserve your principal investment -- may provide reassurance, they often also come with hefty fees and can sharply limit your upside potential.

As a general rule, a low-risk strategy will produce minimal returns. So, while you may feel the urge to lock up all your capital in ultrasafe strategies, you need to be prepared to invest some of it in riskier products.

Meanwhile, Mr. Sheehan reports that some of his clients have even developed an aversion to mortgages. That may be rational for people with no nest egg or a job that's at risk, but it's not something that everyone should be worrying about.

"It's not logical at all," he says, because some have relatively little mortgage debt relative to home value, hold long-term fixed mortgages at the relatively low rate of 5% or so and gain from the tax deduction for mortgage interest.

Yet "all they want to do is pay off that mortgage," to get rid of "this toxic thing -- a mortgage," he says.

THE CHASING-THE-NEWS TRAP: If you're a financial-news junkie, it's tempting to try to react to each twist and turn of the market. But the best thing you can do is turn off the news, put the remote control down on the coffee table and step away from your television set.

In times like these -- an almost unbelievably volatile stock market, a distorted bond market and an economic meltdown -- newshounds can do tremendous damage to their portfolios. Trying to judge exactly the right moment to get into the market -- and then jump out again a day or two later -- is likely to leave you with big headaches and outsize trading expenses.

An "atmosphere of constant, breathless hysteria" isn't conducive to making smart investing moves, says Carol Clark, an investment principal at Lowry Hill, a wealth-management firm in Minneapolis. "That's not what long-term investing is all about.

"Many of those [300-point] interday moves simply don't make a lot of sense in the first place, so how can it be sensible to try and respond to them?" she asks.

Instead of acting on every new development, it's better to look past the noise and invest small amounts regularly, an approach known as dollar-cost averaging. A strategy based on a solid asset-allocation plan and dollar-cost averaging is more likely to lead to sustainable gains over the longer haul.

Ms. Clark offers one final observation. Usually, investors find themselves in traps "because your emotions have run away with your logical thinking," she says. "You need to find ways to start thinking logically again."

Sometimes it helps to do something as simple as making a list of your investment goals and putting it on the refrigerator. Whenever you're tempted to act impulsively in response to something you see on television or hear from a friend at a dinner party, you can go back to that list and remind yourself that yanking money out of the market may not be the best strategy.

"Then, when you feel an urge to turn on CNBC, you train yourself to look at the list instead," she says.

—Ms. McGee is a writer in New York. She can be reached at reports@wsj.com

Steps You Can Take in A Market Decline (WSJ)

THE INTELLIGENT INVESTOR MARCH 4, 2009
Tempest-Tossed? Take Some Control
By JASON ZWEIG

In normal times, the best advice after a market decline is "Don't be afraid." But these are not normal times, and anyone who is not afraid after a 50% market decline has a few screws loose. The trick is to channel your fear into sensible action that will improve your financial future.

Instead of big impulsive steps you may regret later, you should take small and careful steps that will make you feel you have taken charge. Mental-health experts have found that merely believing you have some control over a painful situation is enough to make the pain more bearable. At a time like this, taking a little bit of action can give you a lot of comfort -- both as an immediate salve for your market wounds today and as a portfolio strengthener in the years to come.

For investors, that means being deliberate in everything you do and making sure that all your decisions are gradual and incremental, rather than sudden and drastic. Call it "smart panic" -- calculated actions that free you from the chains of inertia without compelling you to go haywire.

Normally, inertia keeps investors locked into all their investments, good and bad. As Sir Isaac Newton might have put it, an investor at rest stays at rest, and an investor in motion stays in motion, unless acted upon by an outside force. Severe losses can shock any investor out of inertia, often in destructive ways.

Here is a list of constructive steps you can take instead:

Inventory all your assets. The stock market has lost half its value -- but chances are that when you properly measure the performance of all your investments, you will see that your portfolio as a whole is down considerably less. Use an Excel or Google spreadsheet, even just pencil and paper, to tally up all your cash, bonds, stocks, funds and other investments. Only by taking inventory of everything you own can you tell how well or poorly your wealth has held up. In the process, you will also see -- perhaps for the first time -- how well you are diversified. This advice may seem simplistic, but over the years I have met very prominent investors who actually have no idea what they own. If they could benefit from this step, so can you.

Get an upgrade. By erasing your capital gains, the bear market has taken away much of the tax liability that might have entrapped you in an overpriced mutual fund with an underperforming manager. Now you can ditch it and replace it with what you should have held all along: a low-cost index fund (or if you do not invest regularly each month, an exchange-traded fund). Steve Condon, investment director at Truepoint Inc., a wealth-advisory firm in Cincinnati, points out that this will not only lower your annual expenses and your tax bill, but is likely to raise your return when the stock market does recover. That's because the managers of active stock funds have raised their cash levels to an average of nearly 6% of assets, while index funds always keep all their assets in the market.

Change your new money, not your old money. In your 401(k), you could leave your existing positions in stock funds as they are. Bailing out completely is not the only option for reducing your exposure to stocks. You can take your new contributions from future paychecks and direct them into an investment-grade bond fund. You can always reverse this decision later; to make sure you remember, mark your calendar to review the choice one year from now.

Move your dividends. If you own a stock fund, you aren't obligated to reinvest your dividend distributions in more shares of the same fund. Instead, you can deposit them into a bond or money-market fund. That, says finance professor Meir Statman of Santa Clara University, may be less psychologically painful than having to dump the stock fund in its entirety. "You're turning the dividends into 'fresh money' that doesn't have the taint of loss," he says.


Move on tiptoe. If you can't take the pain of being in stocks anymore, then get out -- an inch at a time. Set up an automatic withdrawal plan with your mutual fund or brokerage account, selling a fixed dollar amount each month for, say, the next five years. Take comfort from the fact that you can stop it, decrease it or raise it at any time. Tiptoeing your way out is a move that's easy and cheap to change. Bailing out of the market in one fell swoop, however, is a step that's difficult and expensive to reverse. Besides the commissions you can face, there's a high psychological cost to the regret you may later incur from any impetuous action.

Sell stocks to erase debts. If you do move money out of the stock market, think first about what you should do with the proceeds. One of the smartest possible uses for the money: getting rid of your credit-card debt. With the interest rates on credit-card balances averaging 10% to 13%, this move gives you what New York City financial planner Gary Schatsky calls "an exceptionally high, guaranteed rate of return." According to the Federal Reserve Board, the median credit-card balance, among families that carry one, is $3,000. The median holding in stocks and mutual funds, on the other hand, was $73,000 in 2007. Let's assume that the value of those investments has since fallen by half, to $37,000. Then selling just 10% of their portfolio of stocks and funds would not only make many families feel better; it could get them out of credit-card debt. (With today's low mortgage rates, credit cards are the liability to attack first.)

Smarten up your cash. Designate the cash part of your portfolio as the "risk-free bucket." That way, you can know that at least one portion of your money will be absolutely safe. Allan Roth, a financial planner with WealthLogic LLC in Colorado Springs, Colo., points out that with inflation approaching zero, five-year certificates of deposits yielding up to 4.5% offer "a very high real return." (You can start your search for them at bankdeals.blogspot.com.) Make sure that the bank or credit union offering the CD is backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. or the National Credit Union Administration; double-check at www.fdic.gov or www.ncua.gov. Many investors don't realize that the FDIC and NCUA will insure an IRA separately for up to $250,000 if it is invested in a deposit account like a CD. Putting a high-yielding CD in a retirement vehicle is tax-smart, to boot.

Email: intelligentinvestor@wsj.com
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page D1
Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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Forbes interviews Jeremy Grantham

THE GRANTHAM INTERVIEW
Intelligent Investing with Steve Forbes

[00:08 ] Welcome, I’m Steve Forbes. It's a privilege and a pleasure to introduce you to our featured guest, the great skeptic of Wall Street, Jeremy Grantham.
The bear
who called the stock bubble back in 1998 didn't jump back into U.S. Equities after
it burst the first time. Now, he finally sees opportunities in the equities markets.
[02:51] Grantham's Big Call
STEVE FORBES: Well, thank you Jeremy for joining us today. First, since you
have bragging rights in this situation, what made you a bear, great skeptic
between 1999 until about a couple of months ago you were saying, "Stay out?"
JEREMY GRANTHAM: Well, really very simple. Not rocket science, we take a
long-term view, which makes life, in our opinion, much easier.
STEVE FORBES: Well, everyone says it, but you certainly practiced it.
JEREMY GRANTHAM: We actually do it. Well, we tried the short-term stuff and
it was so hard, we thought we'd better do the long-term. We just assume that at
the end, in those days, of ten years, profit margins will be normal and price
earnings ratios will be normal. And that will create a normal, fair price. And more
recently, we've moved to seven years, because we've found, in our research that
financial series tend to mean revert a little bit faster than ten years, actually,
about six and a half years.So, we rounded to seven. And that's how we do it. And it just happened from
October '98 to October of '08, the ten-year forecast was right. Because, for one
second, in its flight path, the U.S. market and other markets flashed through
normal price. Normal price is about 950 on the S&P. It's a little bit below that
today.
And on my birthday, October the 6th, the U.S. market, ten years and four trading
days later, hit exactly our ten-year forecast of October '98, which is worth talking
about if only to enjoy spectacular luck. The P/E was a little bit lower than
average and the profit margins were a little bit higher, so they beautifully offset.
And given our methodology, that would mean that on October the 6th, the market
should have been fairly priced on our current approach. And indeed it was, that
was even more remarkable, 950, plus or minus a couple of percent.
STEVE FORBES: And what did you see during that ten-year period that made
you feel, other than your own models, that this was something highly abnormal,
that this couldn't last?
JEREMY GRANTHAM: Well, first of all, the magnitude of the overrun in 2000
was legendary. As historians, you know we've massaged the past until it begs
for mercy. And we saw that it was 21 times earnings in 1929, 21 times earnings
in 1965 and 35 times current earnings in 2000. And 35 is bigger than 21 by
enough that you'd expect everyone would see it. Indeed, it looks like a
Himalayan peak coming out of the plain.
And it begs the question, "Why didn't everybody see it?" And I think the answer
to that is, "Everybody did see it." But agency risk or career risk is so profound,
that even if you think the market is gloriously over-priced, you still have to get up
and dance. Because if you sit down too quickly--
STEVE FORBES: Famous words of Mister Prince.
JEREMY GRANTHAM: If you sit down too quickly, you're likely to get yourself
fired for being too conservative. And that's precisely what we did in '98 and '99.
We didn't dance long enough and got out of the growth stocks completely and
underperformed. We produced pretty good numbers, but they're way behind the
benchmark. And we were fired in droves.
I think our asset allocation, which is the division I'm now involved in, we lost 60
percent of our asset base in two and a half years for making the right bets for the
right reasons and winning them. But we still lost more money than any other
person in that field that we came across, which is a fitting reminder that career
risk runs the business.
STEVE FORBES: So, it's all right to be wrong as long as everyone else is
wrong.
JEREMY GRANTHAM: That's right. "I never saw it. Nobody saw it," that's what
they say about today's fiasco, which actually makes me quite disgusted because
almost everyone we talked to did see it coming. And I described it in June of last
year as the most widely-predicted surprise in the history of finance. And that's 18
months ago.
[07:24] A Whole New Bubble
STEVE FORBES: What was it about this bubble, do you think distinguished it, if
one can distinguish bubbles from past bubbles?
JEREMY GRANTHAM: Yeah, oh, I think this was distinguishable in many ways.
I described it, I think, accurately as the first truly global bubble. It had every
asset class, notably real estate, as well as stocks. But bonds were also
overpriced and fine arts, of course, were ridiculous. And secondly, it was global.
So, you know, Indian fine arts were going out of control. And Chinese modern
art --
- STEVE FORBES: But you still bought them, right? Indian fine arts, aren't you?
JEREMY GRANTHAM: I, perhaps, I participated too much in Indian antiquities,
which I have a soft spot for. But so, it was unique in breadth of asset class, in
breadth of reach, globally. Quite unlike anything else since the Depression and
even much broader than the bubble of 1929.
STEVE FORBES: You mentioned about career risk, that it's better to be with the
crowd than going against it and paying a price because people don't like what
you're saying. Did people really believe, do you think, their risk models that said
you can take this outsized risk but, 1) you've hedged it, and 2) if this goes up, this
goes down, and therefore, it's not-- as risky as it looks?
JEREMY GRANTHAM: Oh yes, I think they did. I think you should never
underestimate the ability of really serious quants to believe quant models. They
can really do faith big-time in those models. There's something about having a
PhD in some serious topic like particle physics or math that, when you've finished
a couple of years of hard work and you've produced a model, then your faith in it
can be intense. I think these people really did believe in that stuff.[09:24] Time To Buy
STEVE FORBES: And now that you feel the tide is turning, what should
investors do now? First of all, during that ten-year period, where did you invest
money when you saw this bubbly atmosphere? And what are you doing now?
JEREMY GRANTHAM: Most of our money is in specific funds for institutions.
So, we have an emerging market equity fund. And for institutions, they don't
want us messing around, moving up and down our cash balance. So, they're
fully invested in equities and we're trying to do the best job that we can. We have
an asset allocation group with about 40 percent of our money today.
And there, we are allowed to move around. but even there, we have a clear job
description so that in one account, for example, a fairly typical flavor, we are not
allowed to drop below 45 percent equity or go above 75. So, in the institutional
business, people are pretty hemmed in, most of the time, and we are. Most of
the last ten years, we have been promoting the idea of not taking a lot of
unnecessary risk and that's probably been the most constant theme.
The single exception to that, until quite recently, was emerging markets. We felt
that if you had this irresistible urge to take risk, you should exercise it on
emerging, because you'd get a better bang for your buck. And we were
overweighted for 12 years ending in this July. And we kind of blew the whistle in
July. We had been thinking that emerging was strong enough and fundamental
that we'd ride out the unpleasantness.
And then, on June the 26th, precisely, the penny dropped that I had been quite
optimistic on lots of little fundamentals. None of them, perhaps, profoundly
optimistic, but they accumulated to considerable optimism. And it was revealed
to me that I had just missed evaluated how bad things were going to be,
fundamentally. And one of the reasons was career risk. Because we were the
best, there was a kind of disinclination to wrack your brains to be even further off
the spectrum than you were already.
And since I was already considered a perma-bear, I thought, "Well, we're the
most bearish people around, let's leave it at that. Don't look for trouble." And
then, June the 26th, we had a Glaswegian arrive to kind of review the data with
us, an economic strategist. And he had this dour Glasgow accent. I think that
had something to do with it.
And I came out of the meeting thinking, "Holy cow, this is going to be really, really
awful." And I wrote a courtly letter immediately saying, "I recant on emerging.
Up until now, we'd been advising for two years, 'Take as little risk as you can,
except for emerging.' Our new advice is take as little risk as you can, period.'"
And we held up the letter for two weeks.
We did the biggest trade in our history. And for the first time in 12 years, we
went to underweight emerging across the board, which in some accounts meant
zero. And for the only time in my career, the emerging market immediately
nosedived. I mean, immediately, like the day after we did our trade it headed
south.
And three months later, it was down 40 percent. I mean, I've never seen
anything like that. So, we replaced it. We thought, "Well, 40 percent makes a lot
of difference to anybody." We were looking at 11, 12 percent imputed real
returns for seven years in emerging and we replaced the bet in October.
[13:20] Cheapest in 20 Years
STEVE FORBES: You went back in emerging markets.
JEREMY GRANTHAM: Back in emerging markets.
STEVE FORBES: And in terms of evaluating markets and stocks, in particular,
you have a pretty disciplined formula so you can say precisely 950 and--
JEREMY GRANTHAM: That's exactly right. It may be wrong, but it's precise.
And we've had a long history of doing it the way I described, that everything will
be normal in seven years. And it's turned out to be quite robust. And probably
pretty simple and straightforward-- an effective way of doing it. And right now,
what it says is that, since October, global equity markets have been cheap, not
dramatically cheap, not cheap like you and I have seen a couple of markets,
1982, 1974, that was very cheap, indeed.
This is merely ordinarily cheap. But it's the cheapest it's been for 20 years. For
20 years, we had this remarkable period when the markets were never cheap.
They got less expensive, you know, too, but they were never cheap. And so
now, you have this terrible creative tension between, on one hand, they're the
cheapest they've been for 20 years.
They're pretty decent numbers. For seven years, we expect seven and a half
real from the U.S., from the S&P. And perhaps nine and a half from EAFE and
emerging. These are not bad number for seven years. And on the other hand,
as historians, we all recognize that the great bubbles tend to overrun.
STEVE FORBES: Right.
JEREMY GRANTHAM: And they're not normally satisfied, you can't buy them
off by being slightly cheap. They insist on becoming very cheap. So, we've said
for several months that we thought this cycle would go to 600 or 800 on the S&P,
800 if it was a mild recession, ho-ho. Can throw that one away. And 600 would
be quite normal if it was a severe recession like '82, '74, which I think, I don't
know if you agree, is pretty well baked in the pie today. It may be worse, but it's
probably not going to be much less bad than '74 or '82.
STEVE FORBES: And so, in terms of the markets today, even though they're
cheap, you're going in gingerly or since it could theoretically go down to 600 and
given the emotions you get in these things.
JEREMY GRANTHAM: Yes, I would say two-to-one, by the way, my instinct
plus looking at the history books that it will go to a new low [in 2009]. So, this is
the problem. We're underweighted still, in an ordinary asset allocation account
that has 65 percent in equities, we have moved up to 55. So, we're still
underweight, even though they're cheaper than they've been and they're
reasonably cheap.
Now what happens? If we throw in the client's money and it goes down, indeed,
as I think it will [in 2009], they will complain quite bitterly that we weren't very
smart. We thought it was going down, and yet we threw their money in. So,
that's one kind of regret. And the other kind of regret is that we hang back and
the market runs away, the one-in-three comes up and they say, "You told us the
market was cheap. You told us that you had these nine or ten percent real return
opportunities and you're still underweight and the market's back up 200 points.
You're an idiot."
So, there's no way you can avoid some regret. You have to look at your own
personal balance sheet, how much pain can you stand? If you absolutely can't
stand a 20 percent hit, you'd better carry quite a lot of cash, because you're quite
likely to get it. If on the other hand, you're made of steel, you can concentrate on
the seven-year horizon and filter money in and having a lot of cash here is
probably a bit dangerous from the other point of view.
But in any case, it's a very personal judgment of risk avoidance and how tough
you are under stress. The worst situation that will befall probably quite a lot of
people is that they exaggerate their toughness. The market goes down 30
percent from here to 600 and they panic, dump their stocks and never get back.
And that's the worst outcome.
[17:45] Japan A Blue Chip?
STEVE FORBES: And one of the areas you seem to be interested in is
Japanese stocks?
JEREMY GRANTHAM: I think Japan may turn out, finally, in a curious way, to
be a blue chip here. They've been through a lot of the problems, their ordinary
corporations are no longer super-leveraged as they were, it took them 15 years,
but finally, they got there about three years ago. The banking system is not at
the cutting edge of all the problems, so they look relatively blue chip.
And yes, they're exposed to the global export problem, but when you look at
Japan, they are deceptively low exporting country. It's only 12 percent of their
GDP, it's much lower than most European countries, et cetera. So, I think they're
fundamentally a candidate for the blue chip and plus, they're stock prices, of
course, have been terrible.
STEVE FORBES: Right.
JEREMY GRANTHAM: It's taken them 17 years to lose 78 percent of their
money. This is what I say, that exhibit is called "stock for the very, very long
run." Aimed at Jeremy Siegel if you think that people are machines, then of
course you can tuck stocks away and hold them forever. But ordinary human
beings don't like to wait 17 years to lose 78 percent of their money or 28 years to
round trip in Japan.
They haven't made a penny in 28 years, including dividends, in real terms. And
people have dismissed that, "That's Japan, we're the U.S." And that is, in a way,
the most simple minded of logic. Of course, every country is different. But do
not think that we can't have terrible times. I sincerely hope we will not, and I
don't expect that we will. But you have to consider it a possibility.
[19:38] Emerging Markets- STEVE FORBES: Now, looking at emerging markets, what ones stand out as
particularly enticing right now, or do you try to emerge them all together?
JEREMY GRANTHAM: Merge the emerging, yes. We do, I think. Emerging
market is no longer at all monolithic. There is an exporting clutch, there is a
handful of eastern European that looks a little shaky. There are two or three that
have forgotten the rules of the Asian crisis and have accumulated some foreigndenominated
debt that leaves them very vulnerable. And increasingly, each one
looks separate. But in general, many of them have better finances than they had
in other crises.
STEVE FORBES: Any ones particularly stand out that you?
JEREMY GRANTHAM: Well, Brazil, of course, is much improved from the way it
used to be and has a nice position in natural resources. And on a very long
horizon, I like its style. I'm not making a recommendation based on today's price.
Indeed, I don't know today's price, they most so fast. We had one day the other
day when their entire fund and the index was up over 10 percent for the day. So,
the numbers change at bewildering speed these days.
[20:59] Buy Big US Stocks
STEVE FORBES: And U.S. blue chips, you--
JEREMY GRANTHAM: No, U.S. blue chips, I think is manna from heaven.
They're conservative in a risky world. The best companies on the face of Earth,
right? And from '02 to '07, they were considered boring and all the action was in
the racier, more leveraged stuff. They underperformed every single year from '02
onwards and five years in a row. So, when this trouble started to escalate, they
were about as cheap, on a relative basis, as they ever get.
They were not absolutely cheap, but they were relatively very cheap. And the
best bet, for my money, then and now, a year later, was to buy the great
franchise companies, the great quality companies and to go short the junkier,
more leveraged companies. That's been a very profitable strategy and one of the
few things that has been working this year. This year, of course, as you know,
has been the year from hell for money managers.
The value traps, the like of which we haven't seen since the 1930s, the great
value managers all made their reputation by being braver than the next guy, by
buying the WaMus of the world when they'd fallen to seven and they'd bounce
back to 28. And this time they went from seven to three and they doubled up
again and they went to zero.
It's been a nightmare. And the quants, who use momentum as well as value,
have had no better luck with momentum. And the quant techniques of balancing
- 28 -
risk have also failed, as we were discussing. So, this has been a dreadful year
for money management. And quality has been the one theme that has worked.
And interestingly, from our firm's point of view, it's not a theme that other people
seem to have adopted.
There are not quality funds, there are large cap and growth and value, but there
are no quality funds. And so, it's been hard for people to pick up that theme. But
it has been very, very good since September.
STEVE FORBES: What are a couple of examples of what you consider quality
companies?
JEREMY GRANTHAM: I'm not recommending these companies, except
generically.
STEVE FORBES: Right.
JEREMY GRANTHAM: But, no surprise is Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Proctor and
Gamble, Johnson & Johnson. These are the essence of the great franchise
companies. And collectively, they're not that dependable in bear markets, but
they're incredibly dependable when people's confidence in the fundamentals start
to go. In Japan, for example, the quality companies in Japan outperformed for
nine consecutive years when their troubles came.
They accumulated again against the Japanese market of 98 percent points.
They were brilliant in the Great Depression between '29 and '32. Even though
the Coca-Colas were relatively overpriced in '29, they still went down dramatically
less than the junky companies. But they're the great test of quality. So, you
wouldn't expect quality to be dependable unless we were having the kind of
environment that we seem to be having. And I think they will have legs, they will,
the high quality companies can outperform, handsomely still, from here.
[24:17] Stimulus!
STEVE FORBES: Commodities, you were short oil, your firm was short copper.
When do you go long, or is that just a sideshow?
JEREMY GRANTHAM: That's a very good question. I was thinking about that
in the taxi today. When you see oil breaking $40, I believe oil is the great
exception. I asked over 2,000 full-time professionals to find me a paradigm shift
in a major asset class and they never offered me one, so I was very pleased to
offer oil a couple of years ago. I thought it was the genuine paradigm shift. I
thought that after 100 years at $16 a barrel, it had jumped to maybe $36 or $37
in real terms. And I think it has probably jumped again. It will be revealed in 20
years to what level. But my guess is $60, $65, maybe even $70. But what
people underestimate, even in the oil industry, is how volatile the asset class is.
- 29 -
In other words, if the trend is $65, it is fairly routine for oil to sell below half, say
$30 and more than double, say $145.
And people never get that. So, you don't want to be too quick to buy into
weakness or sell into strength, necessarily. But it can go a long way. But below
40, I must say, I do get a bit interested. And below 30, I'm definitely a buyer.
STEVE FORBES: Wow.
JEREMY GRANTHAM: And copper, copper's done so brilliantly on the
downside, that you really begin to ask, it must be approaching cost of production
somewhere in the next ten or 15 percent, you have to say, "That was very nice,
thank you," and cover.
STEVE FORBES: Now, in terms of the U.S. economy, you've seemed to be
saying that the Fed is doing right, print all you can, and for the government, to
spend all you can.
JEREMY GRANTHAM: Yes, which I have to choke on, as I have no doubt, you
would. Because, normally, it's a terrible
STEVE FORBES: That's why I'm not drinking the water, I don't want to choke.
JEREMY GRANTHAM: It's normally terrible advice. It's only useful when it's the
real McCoy. And I think it is. And if there's unemployment, having the
government help reduce that unemployment, increase employment directly is a
pretty good idea. It's not driving out competition, it's not crowding out. As long
as there's excess unemployed people sitting around like the Great Depression,
you should do everything you can to get them employed and get the system
going again, just as a temporary stopgap, or I believe.
And I think by combining that with energy sufficiency, particularly labor-intensive
kind of energy avoidance, installing insulation, storm windows, very labor
intensive. Battering down solar cells on the roofs of Wal-Marts in California. I
think that will be some of the highest return investments that anyone ever makes.
Just return on capital is very, very high in efficient light bulbs. And therefore
should be done. And I don't mind the government accruing debts as long as
every dollar is spent effectively, with a high return. That works out fine. If you
accumulate debts and waste your money, that's, of course, a disaster. I know I'm
preaching to choir on that one.
STEVE FORBES: And what about tax rates? Isn't that the best stimulus?
Lowering tax rates, changing incentives?
- 30 -
JEREMY GRANTHAM: The trouble is, in these very rare occasions, that
sometimes does not work. Normally, of course, it's a lay-up. But if you give
Japanese corporations were the real crunch there. Here it's consumers.
Japanese corporations had so much debt, that as you threw money at them, they
paid down their debt. They didn't build new factories. They were waking up at
3:00 in the morning sweating that they were insolvent.
Of course, technically, they were insolvent. So, they paid down debt and they
paid down debt. Our consumers are so leveraged that you run the risk with a tax
cut that they're in the same boat. You write them a check, even, same thing as a
tax cut, really. Write then a check for $250 and they'll pay down their credit card
debt because they're getting desperate. They are hugely overstretched. So, it
doesn't necessarily work anymore, pushing on a string. And whereas, if you get
out there and spend money to employ people directly, bashing insulation into
your attic, that does work.
[28:53] Our Leaders Failed
STEVE FORBES: So, what is the one big misplaced assumption today when
you look around at this?
JEREMY GRANTHAM: Reviewing the last two years, of course, it's a misplaced
trust in the competence of our leadership, from the very top. But certainly,
notably, the Fed, the arch-villains of this piece, Treasury, little better, the SEC.
They were cheerleaders, all of them. And they encouraged reckless leverage
and low-quality debt, complicated, un-researched, generally disgraceful.
And they made no effort to resist it in any way. Even jawboning would have been
a great advantage over nothing. Greenspan encouraged, admired the ingenuity
of the new instruments for sub-prime. I mean, went out of his way to encourage
it. Some, as in Greenspan, beat back an attempt to do some regulating of
subprime markets. And I think it looked pretty bad.
Hank Paulson did not move fast enough to recognize that the impending decline
of house prices would create some problems. And Bernanke couldn't even see
the house bubble. On our data and Robert Shillers, it was a three-sigma, one-in-
100 year event. After 100 years of being flat, it soared after 2000. You could not
miss it. And right at the peak, October '06, Bernanke said, "The U.S. housing
market merely reflects a strong economy," unquote.
What was he looking at? Where were his statisticians? These are the guys we
picked out of millions to lead us in a crisis. And they can't see a three-sigma
bubble? Every single bubble of that kind has broken. Asset classes are
incredibly dangerous when they form a bubble and when the bubble breaks. And
Greenspan did not get that, and I've been screaming “abuse” forever. It seems
- 31 -
like as long as I can remember, but I wrote a piece in 2001 called “Feet of Clay,”
saying basically, "This bubble from 2000 will be hard to forgive."
And of course, it was the ancestor of the current problem and the housing
bubble. The housing bubble is even more dangerous because more people own
houses. It's more for the ordinary people. And borrowing is so much easier. So,
that is really the most dangerous. And to do two at once, this time around, and to
do it globally it to truly play with fire. We have lost, or will have lost, is my
estimate, at the bottom, $20 trillion of formerly perceived wealth, from $50 trillion
to $30 [trillion].
And at $50 trillion, we had $42 trillion of debt, of all kinds, which is a fairly
suspiciously high 80 percent ratio of assets. But at $30 [trillion], we will have $42
trillion of debt, which is much more than suspicious. And bankers, who always
get religion after the event, are now going to say that 60 percent ratio might look
better.
And 60 percent of $20 [trillion] is not going to make much of an impression on the
$42 trillion of debt that we have. So we have a lot of what I call "stranded debt,"
$15, $20 trillion. Even at fair price, which is, perhaps, $25 trillion. There's still a
lot of stranded debt. This is going to take years to work through the system, not
a year or two.
[32:37] Dysfunctional Markets
STEVE FORBES: So, what is the best financial lesson you've learned? You've
been in this business for decades.
JEREMY GRANTHAM: The market is incredibly inefficient and capable on rare
occasions of being utterly dysfunctional. And people have a really hard time
getting their brain around that fact. They want to believe that it's approximately
efficient almost all the time and it simply isn't true.
[33:07] China Bubble
STEVE FORBES: So, what is your bold prediction for the future, now?
JEREMY GRANTHAM: In the long run, things will be back to normal. In the
short run, I think China will be a bitter disappointment. I can't believe that the
hardest job in economic history, guiding a vast empire of people and assets,
growing at double-digit industrial production rates can be anything but difficult.
And they've had much less experience than most capitalist countries.
And they have been because of 20 years of wonderfully good luck and favorable
circumstances, we have all been seduced into believing that there walk on water.
- 32 -
And I don't think they do. I think they have a terrible situation, which will be under
stress from all sides.
They export 40 percent of their GDP. The global economy gives a passably
good impression of having run, head down, into a very thick cement wall. And I
can't imagine that their exports will be anything other than mildly disastrous. And
yet, two months ago, the official forecast was still that it wouldn't drop below nine.
I mean, that is at least faintly ludicrous.
STEVE FORBES: What are the other fault lines you see in China?
JEREMY GRANTHAM: I'm not a China expert, so I'd be happy to leave it.
STEVE FORBES: Well, the experts weren't, either.
JEREMY GRANTHAM: They have a very small consumer sector, so it's hard to
stimulate that. A very large capital spending sector, how low does an interest
rate have to get to build another steel mill when there are seven up the road
empty, not operating. It's not an easy situation, I think. Direct spending on roads
and so on is something that might work.
But can they do it big enough since they're already doing it at a dramatic level;
can they increase it enough to rev their economy? I don't think so. I think their
economy will be very flattish for a while. And that will be a bitter shock to
everybody who's learned to depend on them.
STEVE FORBES: And one last question on China, their financial sector, their
stock market, in your mind, is that still very primitive? Does it really provide
capital for genuine entrepreneurs, or is it still all still?
JEREMY GRANTHAM: I can't. I really am not an expert. You look back, and
what you do see about the Chinese market is that it was again, a classic bubble.
It's a beautiful shape, symmetrical, it rises, it peaks and it drops slightly faster
than it went up, which is actually quite typical. And it was a great opportunity that
I regret not having capitalized on more than I did.
STEVE FORBES: But now you're staying away.
JEREMY GRANTHAM: Well, now it's completed the obvious part of the bubble.
It's back to kind of trend line. It may not be, you know, on a long-term
perspective, particularly more vulnerable than others. Even though their
economy will be disappointing in the short-term, of course, it has enormous longterm
potential. I do think emerging is the place to be, in the long-run.
I think it has all the indicators that will be required for the next bubble. It has
wonderful top-lying growth relative to an increasingly sluggish developed world.
- 33 -
It has a very high savings rate and investment rate. And I think it will become a
cliché how passé we all are, the U.S., the U.K., Europe, Japan.
We're running out of people. The number of man-hours offered to the markets
have been dropping without anyone talking about it for ten or 12 years.
Collectively, the G7 is way off its old trend line. By next year, the U.S. will be 14,
15 points behind its long-term trend rates. It's never come close to since the
Great Depression.
STEVE FORBES: Trend line, meaning?
JEREMY GRANTHAM: Just to take the 100-year battleship trend line, which
never deviated at 3.4 or something like this. The Great Depression, it went back
to trend very quickly. And now, we have been drifting off for this is year 13 of
drifting blow trend. We're simply getting more mature and all the other developed
countries are doing the same thing. But emerging has not fallen off its trend line
and has a lot of people coming into the workforce and a huge savings rate.
I think it will do very well. Put it this way, it will appeal to investors. It may not
make any more earnings per share, in other words, I'm not talking about true
fundamental value. I'm talking about how people buy stocks. They love top-line
growth. If they're going to grow at four and a half and we're going to slow down
to two and a half, it's going to look like a no-brainer. So, I think the next big event
in emerging will be that they will sell it at a big P/E premium over us developed
countries, who are suffering from a terminal case of middle-aged spread, I think.
STEVE FORBES: Well, clearly, the way you look at life is anything but a nobrainer.
Thank you very much.
JEREMY GRANTHAM: Thank you. I enjoyed it.

Make Money in Down Markets - an easy and simple way to hedge

Hedge Your Portfolio
from US News and World Report

By Katy Marquardt
Posted December 20, 2007

It can pay to play defense in a market often buffeted by fast and furious one-day drops. In small doses, funds that use hedging strategies can reduce risk in your overall portfolio because their performance doesn't move in tandem with the stock or bond markets. Using sophisticated techniques such as short-selling and options, these funds aim to guard against market declines and still produce respectable long-term returns.



When former economics professor John Hussman's market outlook is gloomy, he can hedge some—or all—of his Hussman Strategic Growth fund using options to bet against major market indexes. The fund is currently fully hedged, its most bearish position. The portfolio holds more than 100 stocks Hussman thinks are somewhat cheap relative to their growth potential. "We're also hedged with indexes that behave similarly and reflect the stocks we own," says Hussman. "The idea is to earn the difference in the stocks' performance." The fund, which returned 11 percent a year on average from its July 2000 launch through December 1, charges a below-average 1.17 percent in annual expenses.

Michael Orkin hedges his Caldwell & Orkin Market Opportunity fund by short-selling—or betting against—individual stocks or sectors. Orkin's bets against the home-building and subprime mortgage sectors helped the fund gain a whopping 33 percent over the past year. It returned an annualized 7 percent over the past decade, 1 percentage point ahead of the S&P 500, with significantly less volatility. The fund charges 1.75 percent in annual fees.

You can execute your own hedging strategy by investing in an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that bets on the decline of an index, investing style, or sector of the market. ProShares' short-selling etfs produce inverse returns of a particular index. For instance, the Short Dow30 bets against the Dow Jones industrial average. The firm also offers a line of "ultra" funds, which essentially return double the opposite of an index's daily gain. Although these funds aren't as risky as pure short-selling, approach them with caution.


http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/50-ways-to-improve-your-life/2007/12/20/hedge-your-portfolio.html