a dangerous behavioral phenomenon, but most folks don’t bother differentiating between fundamental rightness and happenstance. (More on this in Chapter 9.)
Just as the crowd is sometimes right, true contrarians are sometimes wrong. Everyone is wrong sometimes! The goal is simply being right more often than wrong, as opposed to looking right at first but ultimately being wrong more often than not.
Why Most Investors Are Mostly Wrong Most of the Time
It isn’t because they’re uninformed. It isn’t because they lack smarts. Very well-read, bright people who pay close attention to the market often make pretty bad investing decisions! There is usually one simple reason for this: They inadvertently get sucked into consensus views.
Groupthink can happen no matter how careful and studied your methods are. Many folks see investing as a discipline, art or science, which sounds good, but their methods morph into conventional wisdom – usually dangerous in investing. All operate on various sets of beliefs about what is and isn’t good for stocks and when you should and shouldn’t trade. Or they follow rules dictating the same.
Many doctors, lawyers and engineers are prone to this. Not because there is anything wrong with them as people. It isn’t their fault! But their professional training leads them there. In their professional lives, they use a rules-based methodology, and there, it works. But in markets, it doesn’t. For doctors to recommend a treatment, they need scientific proof it works – trials and controlled tests. They apply the same methodology to investing, looking for “rules” that have been back-tested and “proven” to work. Most lawyers are logicians by trade and nature – they expect markets to follow rules, processes and simple logic. Most engineers, too. They expect markets to be linear and rational, just like the systems they build and work with daily.
Rules-based investors usually use similar logic and reach similar conclusions. They use the same patterns, the same if-then assumptions. They end up expecting similar things, and it morphs into a consensus viewpoint. It usually appears very logical! But markets often defy logic, as we’ll soon see.
Other folks take their rules and beliefs from academic theory and textbook curriculum. Theory and textbooks aren’t inherently harmful. Principles and theory can be useful if you layer on independent thought. But many turn theory to dogma, textbooks to rulebooks. Whatever the literature says is good or bad for stocks must be true, always and everywhere. If the rulebook says high price-to-earnings ratios (P/Es) and high interest rates are bad, then they’re bad! To fundamentalists, the canon is often truth. But canon is also widely read – more consensus! Markets price in the consensus pretty quickly and do something else. That “something else” is what the true contrarian wants to figure out.
Some investors use old saws and rules of thumb as a guide – the “playbook.” Here, too, the approach might seem fine. The playbook is supposedly full of time-tested wisdom! If it didn’t work, it wouldn’t be in the playbook! But the more you base decisions on maxims, proverbs, and things everyone just knows, the less likely you are to think independently – and the less likely to have true contrarian views.
The playbook also doesn’t pass a basic logic test – one of the true contrarian’s favorite tools, as we’ll see in Chapter 4. It includes familiar adages, like “buy on the dips” – when stocks are on sale, snap ’em up at a bargain! But that’s also when the playbook would tell you to “cut your losses” – get out of that dog before it goes to zero, and get into something that’s actually going up. One page tells you to “let your profits run” – if it’s going up, stay in! It’ll keep going! Yet the next page tells you to “take some profits off the table.” Which do you choose? Both sound intuitive! If a stock is running, you want to let it run. But you know it could easily run off a cliff, plummeting with legs churning like Wile E. Coyote, so pocketing some of those gains seems wise! The playbook doesn’t tell you which play to run.
Not all rules of thumb are based on price movement. One age-old playbook trick claims to have the secret for profiting off company announcements. You’ve heard it: “Buy the rumor, sell the news.” If the rumor mill says Apple is working on a sexy new phone that operates telekinetically, opens your garage door, feeds your kids and locates distant planets all while you’re on the phone with long-lost Aunt Sally (whom your phone found all on its own!), buy. Don’t wait to find out if it’s true! Get in before it’s too late! Then sell when they announce it, after all the other suckers have piled in. As if it can’t possibly go up more, as if the company has zero potential lift, will never do anything new and cool again ever, and maybe even do something else with another rumor right after that new phone is announced. How could you know?
All of these approaches rest on widely known information – and common interpretations of that information. No matter how intuitive and logical, they’re what “everyone” does. The true contrarian moves beyond consensus views and conventional wisdom. Life is way more exciting there, in the wide-open air.
Mass media reflects and also influences sentiment, and most of it has become steadily more groupthink, in my view, over the last two decades. Journalism today embodies John Maynard Keynes’ old maxim: “Worldly wisdom teaches it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.”
It wasn’t always so. Pre-Internet, pre-cable, journalists often had distinct views. When you had three major national news networks and a handful of major national financial publications, pundits competed with insight. They wanted to be groundbreaking. Now, we have dozens of 24/7 cable news outlets, scores of financial websites and countless blogs – and every article and blog post has a comment feed where anyone and everyone can roast the author publicly and anonymously. Nothing attracts a roasting like an article far out of step with mainstream thinking. It drives the wing nut in the crowd into posting Internet terrorism, which cowers and moderates authors, melding a groupthink media. In some few realms, increased competition isn’t always uniformly good.
But there is a big silver lining! Modern media makes it pretty easy to spot widely held beliefs and mass sentiment. The media will only rarely quote anyone outside the herd or anti-herd.
I experienced this firsthand whenever journalists asked my opinion about quantitative easing (QE). You’ve probably heard of it. It’s a program the Fed launched during the 2008 financial crisis – an effort to boost liquidity and lower long-term interest rates so businesses and people would be eager to borrow. For years, the Fed bought Treasury bonds and agency mortgage-backed securities from banks and paid with newly created electronic “reserve credits.” Well over
When journalists asked my opinion, I told them what they didn’t like. Something outside the herd or anti-herd. When you reduce long-term rates while short-term rates are pegged near zero, you flatten the yield curve – shrink the spread between short and long rates. We have more than 100 years of evidence confirming a wider spread is the real magic. Why? Think about bank lending. Short-term rates are banks’ funding costs. Long-term rates are their lending revenues. The difference – long rates minus short rates – mimics a bank’s gross operating profit margin.
Banks aren’t charities. They’re for-profit. The more profitable lending is, the more they’ll do it. The less profits, the less eager bankers are. They’ll sit on their hands. Just like they did all through QE. For years, the herd thought the Fed was the only thing propping up growth. In reality, the Fed killed lending and gave us the slowest loan growth in decades, almost no growth in the quantity of money (aka M4) – a point almost no one noticed – and the slowest gross domestic product (GDP) growth since World War II.
I explained all this to reporters, in vast detail with data. It made sense, they said! But they didn’t print it. If everyone said QE was a loose monetary policy, how could they publish some wacko saying it wasn’t? They couldn’t, because the wing nut part of the crowd would crucify them.
Major outlets wouldn’t, couldn’t print such a view on QE. In an age where seemingly every quoted expert, the