During the holiday break, if you didn’t completely turn off from finance and investing, you may have read one, two or a dozen columns about where the markets are heading in 2016, ‘how to make money in 2016’ and where the best returns will come from in 2016.
Most are simply a waste of your time and you would have been better off ditching the articles and jumping in the water or heading down the slopes with your kids, partner or friends.
Forecasting doesn’t work
The sagest advice I have received on forecasting is that if I wanted to be successful at predicting markets, I should simply do it often. As investing professionals, we are regularly asked for insights that stem from our crystal ball gazing and for many it pays to participate. Those that get it right are lauded as if they have an omnipotent connection to the future, and such is the brevity of our memories, those who get it wrong are forgotten.
And such is the ability of some self-proclaimed prophets to spin their incorrect predictions into divine prophesy that they see no diminution in their monthly newsletter sales. I recall one magniloquent and high profile commentator stating with almost daily certainty that the Australian equity market would end 2016 above 6000 points. At the time the prediction was made the market was indeed close to that level. Of course, the market ended significantly below 6000 and traded below 5000 points after the prognostication was made. But in early 2016, the commentator slipped in that he got the call right (emphasis added):
“… the return of stock buyers whenever we hover around 5000 or just below tells us that the majority of stock players don’t see our market worthy of being at 6000, which we missed by five lousy points on March 23.”
Desist from forecasting altogether
Long-term investing success has nothing to do with forecasting share prices, politics or economics and everything to do with buying businesses whose intrinsic values rise over the long run. The share price will look after itself if the value of the business is rising steadily over the years. To offer any forecast of where the stock market will be, demonstrates a lack of understanding of this basic investing principle. A forecast tells you a great deal about the forecaster but nothing about what is to come.
Those who presume to understand the machinations of the economy and the markets and then offer their ‘insights’ simply haven’t learned that 1) they will never do better than 50/50 with their forecasts and 2) their forecasts aren’t required by you for you to be a successful investor.
There’s a constant temptation however to believe the facts one has collected amount to some undeniable insight about the future that one can bet the farm. To save ourselves at Montgomery from falling into this trap, with 50/50 outcomes, we developed a process. And much as one does when marrying - vowing to have and to hold for better or worse – we publicly committed to our investors, their advisers and the ratings houses to follow the process come what may.
At the beginning of 2015, I was asked whether I thought the market was expensive or cheap and I argued that the market seemed expensive because value did not abound, and that it would be difficult to generate meaningful returns.
It isn’t wise for fund managers to say such things because rather than appearing knowledgeable, it risks influencing investors to zip up their wallets. Of course, while we may have been right (50/50 remember!) with our prognostications – for the year to 31 December 2015 the Australian All Ordinaries Index declined by 0.8%, add in dividends and the return was just 2.8% – the Montgomery Fund returned significantly outperformed after all fees and expenses. If I had accurately predicted a 2.8% return for the market and decided the risks outweighed the benefits, so listening to myself, put all of my money into a term deposit, I would have missed the strong return.
Invest in strong businesses and be patient
And that’s the point. The stock market index is not where you should be investing (my piece on the problems of index investing is here). You should be investing at rational prices in businesses you are reasonably confident, if not virtually certain, will be materially larger and at least equally profitable in many years hence. General stock market and economic forecasts are largely irrelevant over the timeframe I am contemplating.
When we observed early in 2015 that the market was expensive, we also noted that banks and mining companies, at the highs, were unsafe investments, but this was not a prediction about the direction of the share prices of these stocks or what would happen next. What we simply observed is that investors were behaving dangerously and without regard to risk when they were chasing high yields and ignoring whether those dividends they were chasing were being supported by growth. We were simply saying that it was a mistake to chase yield at the expense of growth.
A business adds value by retaining profits and redeploying that incremental capital at attractive rates of return. It’s that simple. To maximize your returns, you have to fill your portfolio with companies able to retain large amounts of capital and generate large returns on that capital. The share prices of these companies will look after themselves over the long run.
The short run is merely the period over which stock prices for these companies overreact on both the upside and downside and therefore it is the period over which you can take advantage of the market’s manic moods.
Ignore everything else in 2016 and you should do well over the long run.
Roger Montgomery is the Founder and Chief Investment Officer at The Montgomery Fund, and author of the bestseller ‘Value.able’. This article is for general educational purposes and does not consider the specific needs of any individual.