Monday, February 22, 2010
Taiwan 4th Q GDP Booms
Taiwan's 4th quarter was up 18% at an annual rate and over 9% yoy. China's extraordinary monetary expansion is affecting all of its close trading partners, including Korea, Japan and Taiwan. Bank loans in January in China increased at a 50% annual rate. A bust will follow the boom.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
US states' pensions underfunded by $1 trillion.
The worst state is Illinois, which is short $48 billion: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/business/economy/18pew.html
Today's New York Times also has an article describing how US retirees are becoming itinerant workers to get by: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/us/18campers.html
Today's New York Times also has an article describing how US retirees are becoming itinerant workers to get by: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/us/18campers.html
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
The Straits Times reports today that Malaysia has caned three women in a prison near KL. This is the first caning of women since independence. Still pending, I believe, is the caning of an actress caught drinking beer with her husband. Also in Malaysia, the use of the world "Allah" for God is now illegal for non-moslems, even though this is the word for "God" is Malay. Christian bibles and references to God in Christian malay-language newspapers are now punishable offenses. Malaysia continues to make progress in the direction it is going.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Inside investment: They said it couldn’t be done
Lincoln Rathnam
Form Euromoney Magazine, Sunday, February 07, 2010
Is the money management industry – or ought it to be – facing an existential crisis?
An investment strategist at one of the big European banks was asked not long ago on one of the financial wallpaper channels if professional investors had learnt the lessons of 2008-09. "No," he replied, "they will never be able to learn such lessons because they are chasing returns over a six-month to 12-month period and returns cannot be predicted over such short time horizons."
My first reaction was to reflect that this is the kind of pessimistic thinking that made Europe what it is today, for better or worse. But, then, scepticism and pessimism have a long and honourable tradition there. One need only mention the name of Arthur Schopenhauer, who maintained that in life pain always predominates over pleasure. Schopenhauer’s disciple, Eduard von Hartmann, took this genial idea even further by positing that Schopenhauer was too optimistic.
According to von Hartmann, all is pain. What we perceive as pleasure is in reality a lesser degree of pain, which only serves to make the rest of the pain more intense by contrast. Suicide was therefore the only logical choice. But suicide is a selfish gesture. Von Hartmann advocated that the nobler course would be for all people to cooperate to bring to an end existence.
The legendary optimism of the US is quite different. In that blessed land, they believe in all sorts of things that seem unlikely or even impossible, like beating the S&P500, balancing the federal budget, and living comfortably on $20,000 a year in social security income, supplemented, of course, by bagging groceries at the local supermarket. American optimism is perhaps best exemplified by the rather homely wisdom of Detroit poet Edgar Guest (1881-1959).
Guest praised such qualities as "pluck," and "sticktoitiveness". His poem It couldn’t be done is illustrative: "Somebody said that it couldn’t be done,/But he with a chuckle replied/That ‘maybe it couldn’t,’ but he would be one/ Who wouldn’t say so till he’d tried./So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin/On his face. If he worried he hid it./He started to sing as he tackled the thing/That couldn’t be done, and he did it."
In the late 1980s, the Boston Securities Analyst Society sponsored a series of luncheon presentations entitled The wisdom of the master investors. One of the masters told a story about one of his early clients, who had come into a substantial amount of money. She gave him management discretion, asking only that the budding master let her lawyer brother know when a change was made to the portfolio.
After a number of years the brother also died and the young master took over his securities as well. He was surprised to see that the brother had been buying the same stocks and bonds whenever a change was made in the sister’s account, which saved on the management fee. The brother’s returns, however, were much better because he rarely sold securities once purchased. Like Warren Buffett, the brother focused on the buy decision and let subsequent prices take care of themselves. The manager profited
from this lesson, which is why he became a master.
Speaking of Guest’s home town, Detroit, General Motors’ interim chief executive, Edward Whitacre Jr, just announced that his position would become permanent, and he seemed extremely gratified by his decision, for which we offer heartfelt congratulations. In true Edgar Guest fashion, when life deals you lemons, down-and-out Detroit is still willing to use them to make lemonade, and Whitacre proudly announced that GM would pay back the $8.1 billion lent to it by the people of the US and Canada by mid-year. (And they said it couldn’t be done!) Of course, one cannot but wonder about the repayment of the $44 billion still on GM’s balance sheet in 2007; in the long run, if private stockholders and bondholders get nothing, to the benefit of government, the cost of capital will certainly rise as scepticism increases, not just for GM but for all securities.
So have professional investment managers and their clients given themselves an impossible goal, that of generating superior short-term returns? On the BBC many years ago a comic parodied the poet laureate of Detroit as follows: "They said it couldn’t be done./They said nobody could do it,/So I tried that thing that could be done,/And, you know... I couldn’t do it."
Had he been alive and watching the BBC at that moment, von Hartmann would have agreed and gone further to argue that what we perceived as superior performance (pleasure) is merely bad performance that is better than even worse results (pain). After all, it is sobering to realize that US equities returned only 6.7% real annualized across the entire 20th century, which is probably worse than investors wanted. While not suggesting à la von Hartmann that we bring an end to all so-called portfolio management, let us at least temper our expectations about the results it can achieve.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Lincoln Rathnam, PhD, CFA, is an investment professional based in Singapore and Boston. In a career spanning almost 30 years he has managed equity, debt and venture capital portfolios and was a pioneer investor in emerging markets in the late 1980s.
Subscribe today:
You can order Euromoney by contacting our subscription hotline:
Call: +44 (0)20 7779 8999 (UK) or +1 212 224 3570
http://www.euromoney.com/Print.aspx?ArticleID=2388560 2/7/2010
Lincoln Rathnam
Form Euromoney Magazine, Sunday, February 07, 2010
Is the money management industry – or ought it to be – facing an existential crisis?
An investment strategist at one of the big European banks was asked not long ago on one of the financial wallpaper channels if professional investors had learnt the lessons of 2008-09. "No," he replied, "they will never be able to learn such lessons because they are chasing returns over a six-month to 12-month period and returns cannot be predicted over such short time horizons."
My first reaction was to reflect that this is the kind of pessimistic thinking that made Europe what it is today, for better or worse. But, then, scepticism and pessimism have a long and honourable tradition there. One need only mention the name of Arthur Schopenhauer, who maintained that in life pain always predominates over pleasure. Schopenhauer’s disciple, Eduard von Hartmann, took this genial idea even further by positing that Schopenhauer was too optimistic.
According to von Hartmann, all is pain. What we perceive as pleasure is in reality a lesser degree of pain, which only serves to make the rest of the pain more intense by contrast. Suicide was therefore the only logical choice. But suicide is a selfish gesture. Von Hartmann advocated that the nobler course would be for all people to cooperate to bring to an end existence.
The legendary optimism of the US is quite different. In that blessed land, they believe in all sorts of things that seem unlikely or even impossible, like beating the S&P500, balancing the federal budget, and living comfortably on $20,000 a year in social security income, supplemented, of course, by bagging groceries at the local supermarket. American optimism is perhaps best exemplified by the rather homely wisdom of Detroit poet Edgar Guest (1881-1959).
Guest praised such qualities as "pluck," and "sticktoitiveness". His poem It couldn’t be done is illustrative: "Somebody said that it couldn’t be done,/But he with a chuckle replied/That ‘maybe it couldn’t,’ but he would be one/ Who wouldn’t say so till he’d tried./So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin/On his face. If he worried he hid it./He started to sing as he tackled the thing/That couldn’t be done, and he did it."
In the late 1980s, the Boston Securities Analyst Society sponsored a series of luncheon presentations entitled The wisdom of the master investors. One of the masters told a story about one of his early clients, who had come into a substantial amount of money. She gave him management discretion, asking only that the budding master let her lawyer brother know when a change was made to the portfolio.
After a number of years the brother also died and the young master took over his securities as well. He was surprised to see that the brother had been buying the same stocks and bonds whenever a change was made in the sister’s account, which saved on the management fee. The brother’s returns, however, were much better because he rarely sold securities once purchased. Like Warren Buffett, the brother focused on the buy decision and let subsequent prices take care of themselves. The manager profited
from this lesson, which is why he became a master.
Speaking of Guest’s home town, Detroit, General Motors’ interim chief executive, Edward Whitacre Jr, just announced that his position would become permanent, and he seemed extremely gratified by his decision, for which we offer heartfelt congratulations. In true Edgar Guest fashion, when life deals you lemons, down-and-out Detroit is still willing to use them to make lemonade, and Whitacre proudly announced that GM would pay back the $8.1 billion lent to it by the people of the US and Canada by mid-year. (And they said it couldn’t be done!) Of course, one cannot but wonder about the repayment of the $44 billion still on GM’s balance sheet in 2007; in the long run, if private stockholders and bondholders get nothing, to the benefit of government, the cost of capital will certainly rise as scepticism increases, not just for GM but for all securities.
So have professional investment managers and their clients given themselves an impossible goal, that of generating superior short-term returns? On the BBC many years ago a comic parodied the poet laureate of Detroit as follows: "They said it couldn’t be done./They said nobody could do it,/So I tried that thing that could be done,/And, you know... I couldn’t do it."
Had he been alive and watching the BBC at that moment, von Hartmann would have agreed and gone further to argue that what we perceived as superior performance (pleasure) is merely bad performance that is better than even worse results (pain). After all, it is sobering to realize that US equities returned only 6.7% real annualized across the entire 20th century, which is probably worse than investors wanted. While not suggesting à la von Hartmann that we bring an end to all so-called portfolio management, let us at least temper our expectations about the results it can achieve.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Lincoln Rathnam, PhD, CFA, is an investment professional based in Singapore and Boston. In a career spanning almost 30 years he has managed equity, debt and venture capital portfolios and was a pioneer investor in emerging markets in the late 1980s.
Subscribe today:
You can order Euromoney by contacting our subscription hotline:
Call: +44 (0)20 7779 8999 (UK) or +1 212 224 3570
http://www.euromoney.com/Print.aspx?ArticleID=2388560 2/7/2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
