One of the best tricks for living a happy life is to turn off the news. This includes social media feeds. Both mediums are designed to constantly bombard you with sensational elements to keep you hooked. They are not the source of truth or any useful information.

The same goes for stock investing. There are TV channels dedicated to talking about stocks 24/7, but you need to avoid them. You also need to understand that historically stock picking has been a losing game.

Why Stock Picking Fails

Two words: Market Efficiency

Stock prices are constantly adjusting to the news that is available to all market participants. Without insider information, it’s impossible to predict future news. Can you tell if Apple will fall above or below their next earnings forecast? I don’t think so. If you had that magical ability, you’d be wealthy beyond imagination.

Stock pickers wrongly presume there are mispriced stocks that can be identified in advance and exploited for profit. They don’t realize that virtually all of the information about a stock, a sector, or an economy is very quickly digested by the entirety of market participants and swiftly embedded into the price of that security.

Because information is available so quickly, you never have an advantage over the millions of other market participants. Stocks are always “priced fairly” given the current information that is available. This market efficiency ensures the prices agreed upon between willing buyers and willing sellers are the best estimate of fair market values.
In other words, when you try to buy underpriced “winners” or sell overpriced “losers,” you have to think the person on the other side of the trade is misinformed or stupid. Why else would they be taking the opposite position?

Read more: How to buy tokenized stocks through crypto exchanges

Millions of investors, and an army of brokers, believe their own personal version of this fairy tale. And when someone indicates that they are beating the market while selecting individual stocks, they are also confessing the belief that the market is composed of fools.

Consider an online newsletter that shares “insider secrets” and recommends certain stocks. What are they basing these recommendations on? The only information they have is widely available to the public, for free.

If the newsletter worked, why would the author be sharing that information? Why not just keep the secret and make a fortune picking stocks? Furthermore, if the recommendations were sound, who on earth would be willing to part with a stock rated “buy” and sell it to you? And what kind of dimwit would later buy when the recommendation was to sell?

The reason that newsletters underperform the market is the same reason that individual investors underperform the market. They overestimate their knowledge and ability to predict the future.

Remember, when you decide to buy and sell stocks, you’re competing against Warren Buffett, the giant Yale endowment fund, corporate insiders, and an army of PhD quants who stare at numbers for 14 hours each day. Why do you think you have more information than the professionals on the other side of the trade?

And even if you somehow did know more than those people, what makes you think that anyone can predict the future prices of any given stock? You can’t! And neither can most professionally managed mutual funds and hedge funds.

Research on the Failure of Stock Picking

Research shows that from 1975 to 2006, 99.4% of portfolio managers displayed no evidence of genuine stock-picking skill, and the 0.6% of managers who did outperform the index were “statistically indistinguishable from zero”.

This doesn’t mean that no mutual funds have beaten the market in recent years. Some have done so repeatedly over periods as short as a year or two. But the number of funds that have beaten the market over their entire histories is so small that the False Discovery Rate test can’t eliminate the possibility that the few that did were merely false positives, in other words, they got lucky.

Individuals Are Even Worse

Individual investors:

• Underperform standard benchmarks (e.g., a low-cost index fund)
• Sell winning investments while holding losing investments (the “disposition effect”)
• Are heavily influenced by limited attention and past return performance in their purchase decisions
• Engage in naïve reinforcement learning by repeating past behaviors that coincided with pleasure while avoiding past behaviors that generated pain
• Tend to hold undiversified stock portfolios

These behaviors deleteriously affect the financial well-being of individual investors.

Individual investors who hold common stocks directly pay a tremendous performance penalty for active trading. Of 66,465 households with accounts at a large discount broker during 1991 to 1996, those that traded most earned an annual return of 11.4 percent, while the market returned 17.9 percent. Overconfidence can explain high trading levels and the resulting poor performance of individual investors.

Read more: The best online stock brokers in Europe

Most investors also underperform the market by choosing to chase after hot companies that receive loads of publicity.

In their book Creative Destruction, Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan analyzed the companies of the original S&P 500 Index created in 1957. Quite shockingly, only 74 of the original companies remained on the list in 1997, and just 12 of them ended up with returns that outperformed the index for the 41-year period through 1998. 12 out of 500!

Keep in mind that these 500 companies are some of the biggest and most influential in the world. They are not small, distressed firms that you’ve never heard of. They are giants that people love to talk about. Just think about how many people bought the stock of these “safe investments” while trying to outperform the index.

And the authors sum up the problem with stock picking quite well:

As the ’80s passed and we made our way through the ‘90s, both of us observed that almost as soon as any company had been praised in the popular management literature as excellent or somehow super durable, it began to deteriorate.

If you still aren’t convinced, have a look at the 2010 study “Stocks of Admired Companies and Spurned Ones” by Meir Statman and Deniz Anginer.

The study was based on Fortune Magazine’s annual list of “America’s Most Admired Companies” from 1983 to 2007. The authors created two portfolios from the data, with one representing the most admired companies and the other representing the “spurned” or least admired companies. The “admired” portfolio contained the stocks with the highest Fortune ratings (which were popular companies like Disney and Google), and the “spurned” portfolio contained the stocks with the lowest Fortune ratings (which were no-name companies like Jet Blue and Bridgestone).

Can you guess the outcome?

Stocks of admired companies had lower returns, on average, than stocks of spurned companies. 16.12% annualized return of the spurned portfolio versus the 13.81% annualized return of the admired portfolio over the nearly 25 year span.

Not only that, but they found exactly the same results as the authors above.

We find that increases in admiration were followed, on average, by lower returns.

More media coverage and hype results in more popularity, which causes more people to buy the stock. This results in higher stock prices and ultimately, lower future returns.
Conclusion

The research is clear. Investors lose when they trade frequently and attempt to pick stocks. Keep in mind that even if someone could outperform the market by selecting individual stocks, they’d likely still underperform after accounting for taxes and transaction costs.

And how about the million-dollar question: If stock picking is so hopelessly futile, why does the media continue talking about it? Why do brokers continue selling it? Why do individual investors keep chasing it?

Read more: Index Investing for European Investors

A couple of reasons actually.

People are suckers who love a good story. Research and reason don’t sell magazines.  No big brokerage firm is going to place a full-page ad that says, “Trading your portfolio with us will cost you a fortune over time in fees and expenses, therefore you’re almost guaranteed to underperform an appropriate index fund.” No, they keep hawking the latest high-tech mutual fund, selling the dream while collecting those fees.

People desperately want to be better than the average, and smarter than the next investor, even though they probably aren’t either.

The best way to win this game is by refusing to play it. Invest in a global mix of low-expense ETFs via a good broker like DEGIRO and you’re good to go.

And Yet… I Still Pick Stocks

While all the evidence seems to be in favor of using low-cost index funds, the truth is that there are plenty of investors that have made big returns by picking stocks.

By going with the masses and choosing an index fund, you will only get average returns. This might be a fine strategy if you are adopting a defensive position, perhaps a bit later in life when you’ve already achieved your desired level of wealth and just want to grow it slowly over time.

All the wealthy people I know have either invested a huge chunk of their time and energy (10 years+) into a single project that becomes their golden egg, or picked a few stocks early in their trajectory and multiplied their money many times over. Even more common is a combination of both of these strategies – investing time in a business that eventually makes a lot of money, then investing part of that money into stocks or other businesses and multiplying the original wealth with minimal additional effort.

This strategy works well because these kinds of people are provably high performers that tend to be among the best and most informed in their industry, and they can spot new trends and markets before anyone else can. And therein lies possibly the only instance where the efficient market hypothesis breaks down.

What these people are doing is not stock picking in reality, and they tend not to care much about stock prices at all. They are applying their experience, connections, and vision to identify where the world is going, then betting on the companies that have already gained a foothold in those new trends.

Adopting such a strategy is especially well suited to tech investors because among all industries the tech industry is probably the most open and well discussed. While many commentators have long spoken of the tech bubble, and that investing in tech only works until it doesn’t, I believe that every company is now becoming a tech company, and this is not a trend that will end soon. For example, we have an upcoming monetary revolution that is driven by, guess what, new technology – in the form of Bitcoin, Ethereum and other protocols that are upending a very low-tech and tightly controlled monetary system.

Final Thoughts

So yes, in general, stock picking is a loser’s game and the chances of you making money in the long run by picking stocks are slim. However, if you’re lucky you can strike it big, so if you fit a certain profile, then stock picking might work for you.

As for me, I combine my deep knowledge of the tech industry together with that of nascent technologies like crypto, as well as my natural interest in spending time reading about investments, in order to try and generate outsized returns. So far, so good, but will it work long-term or will I spectacularly lose it all at some point? Only time will tell…

If you’ve been investing in cryptoassets for some time, you might have amassed some good gains in Bitcoin, Ethereum etc.

You might be considering rebalancing your portfolio so that crypto isn’t overly dominant, but there is one major problem. Banks still don’t like to deal with crypto exchanges, and you can have problems passing fiat currency through your bank account after withdrawing from an exchange. If your intention is to invest in stocks with that money, you can now bypass the banks entirely by using stablecoins to move money to an exchange that offers tokenized stocks.

Binance is offering some select stocks that you can trade via the Binance app or web platform. You can read my full review of Binance if you haven’t used it before.

FTX is one other exchange that you can use to buy tokenized stocks, and I have reviewed this exchange in-depth here.

FTX offers tokenized stock trading markets on a number of large-cap companies that are listed in the US. For instance, TSLA/USD is a market that trades the tokens of Tesla stocks. This works similarly to other financial derivatives. 

Meaning – when you trade these tokenized stocks, instead of owning the underlying shares, you are trading tokens that reflect the value of its future stock price. With that said, you can redeem the tokenized stocks you own with CM Equity for the actual shares. FTX is also looking to add more ways for users to withdraw tokens from FTX. 

Tokenized stocks are traded like any other asset on the spot market. The only condition is that you have to clear KYC level 2 with FTX. 

There is an extra layer of risk with tokenized stocks, as you have to trust that the exchange keeps full reserves of stocks in correspondence with the tokens issued. However, if you’re stuck being unable to cash out in the traditional way, I think this is an acceptable risk to take.

Moreover, exchanges like FTX even allow you to speculate on pre-IPO stocks, such as Coinbase, which traded for weeks on FTX (as a derivative instrument) before being issued on the NASDAQ market officially.

Buy tokenized stocks on FTX

On the other hand, you can also buy traditional stocks from platforms that allow trading in both cryptos and stocks, with eToro being my favorite for this purpose.

Read more: How to buy exposure to cryptos via a traditional stock broker

So what you would do in this case is to transfer your crypto to eToro, sell it for Euro or USD, then use those funds to buy stocks within eToro itself.

If you’d like to learn more about how eToro works, please head over to my in-depth review of eToro for a comprehensive look at what you can do on this popular platform.

Buy stocks on eToro

What are your thoughts? Have you found any other ways of buying stocks with crypto?

Robo advisors are slowly but surely becoming a mainstream option in the investment sector – making it possible for everyone to access low-cost financial guidance. As the number of online robo advisors continues to rise, so does the range of available services. 

InbestMe is one such automated investment platform currently available in the online retail trading market. Although based in Spain, its fintech solutions extend to investors from across the globe. 

In this review, I run through the fundamentals of InbestMe, covering its core features and whether it measures up as a reliable financial platform for your investment needs. 

What is InbestMe?

InbestMe is an automated online investment management platform that allows you to create a personalized portfolio based on your financial goals. 

In other words, the platform designs an investment plan that fits your risk profile, values, and objectives. This is achieved thanks to a dedicated algorithm – which is capable of calculating the future profitability of different scenarios based on historical data, market analysis, news, and other contributing factors. 

[Read more…]

Let’s talk about Wall Street – how it works and what’s its relation with crypto.

Wall Street doesn’t care about price, they want flows.

Here is a great quote from former hedge fund manager Ben Hunt on the business model behind Wall Street.

“Most people on the outside of Wall Street think that the goal is to invent or accumulate an asset that goes up in price a lot. They think that’s winning.

What I would say to you is that is not how Wall Street works. They really don’t care about the price of anything.

The way that you make real money is not by the price of something going up, it’s by being in the middle of flow.”

In Ben’s vernacular, “flow” is the never-ending river of money that is looking for investments.

Outside of Wall Street, there is a common perception that Wall Street = investors. To some extent that is true, big asset managers are certainly a part of Wall Street, but it’s also not true.

Wall Street is a marketplace that has a similar business model to many “platform” business models you see today. It is entirely based on facilitating and taking slices of transactions.

For Uber, that means connecting drivers with passengers. For Wall Street, and capital markets more broadly, that means connecting investors with investment opportunities.

On its best days, Wall Street ensures that capital is properly allocated to companies that deserve it. On its worst days, it’s a casino that is happy to milk its customers to the bone.

Ben references the great financial crisis as an example of how this business model can go bad.

“The great financial crisis was all based on the creation of a new asset class called ‘non-conforming residential mortgage-backed securities.’ It was this brilliant idea that there are two parts to mortgages – a loan and the deed.

What if we cut those in two? So that we separated the loan part from the deed or collateral part. We’ll take all these loans and pool them together, tranche them up, and then we’re going to sell them.

This became a $10 trillion asset class. And all of this, the changes in the laws around mortgages, it was all part and parcel of creating a thing where Wall Street could get in the middle of trillions of dollars of flow.”

The system is a real-world manifestation of the paperclip maximizer problem, a thought experiment that explores the danger of artificial intelligence.

The thought experiment warns of the danger of a single-minded AI tasked with ‘maximizing’ the creation of paperclips, which in its most extreme case could end with a world full of paperclips and every human dead.

Wall Street is like the AI running that paperclip factory. It is a closed system guarded with gatekeepers that are incentivized to keep churning out paperclips, no matter what.

How do crypto ‘hodlers’ fit into that?

Crypto is the complete antithesis of Wall Street. It is an open, transparent system that is built on the premise of financial inclusion.

The industry encourages financial control and independence, and famously advises its participants to “HODL” as a means of building wealth.

Crypto is designed to eliminate the need for centralized intermediaries and all of the perverse incentives that accompany them. So was the internet though, and we all know how that worked out.

It seems like Wall Street and crypto are on a collision course. I just hope that Bitcoin chews up Wall Street and not the other way around.