Análisis teórico de concentración de tensiones

Are you the type of consumer who waits patiently for sales, even if they don’t come around for months or years at a stretch? Do you hang onto antiques or memorabilia for years, allowing them to gather dust in the attic, in hopes that someday someone will want what you have?

If the answer is yes, then chances are, you’re a buy and hold investor. Buy and hold is exactly what the name describes: someone who is willing to hang onto stocks, bonds, or real estate properties for years, even if they don’t ini- tially rise in value, so that they can sell them at a higher price down the road. There was a time, not so long ago, when the majority of investors classi- fied themselves as buy and holders. A few decades ago the average holding period(a fancy term for how long someone hangs onto an investment before selling) for a mutual fund investor was 20 years. That meant many of us in- vested in our funds for a generation, developing a loyalty to the fund and giving the manager time to do his or her work. In other words, we worried

Fig. 4-6. The Index vs. Actively Managed Stock Funds (1950–1999).

This chart indicates annualized rates of returns of the S&P 500 versus actively managed stock funds between 1950 and 1999.

more about long-term gains than short-term fluctuations in our portfolios. Today, the average holding period is below three years.

The same is true for stock fund managers. A generation ago the average domestic stock fund had aturnover rateof around 30 percent. Turnover refers to the speed with which a fund manager sells out of all his holdings. A turnover rate of 100 percent means the fund is likely to replace all of its stocks in one year. A turnover rate of 33 percent means it may take more than three years for a fund to turn over all of its investments. Today, the average turn- over rate for a stock fund is around 113 percent. (You can look up a fund’s turnover rate and other statistics on www.morningstar.com.)

More and more, investors have become pick and rollers. This simply means that this group of investors is willing to sell out of an investment quickly if: (a) bad things start to happen; (b) its price falls sharply, say, 10 percent or more; (c) its price rises sufficiently to book a quick profit; or (d) a better investment comes along. In the heyday of the late 1990s Internet investing craze,day traders, who sold stock within minutes of buying in order to book intrahour profits, were the icons of this philosophy of investing. Today there are more moderate ex- amples of pick and rollers, such asswing traders, a more reformed version of day traders who hang onto stocks for days and weeks before flipping out.

While a buy and holder is willing to ride out short-term troubles, pick and rollers would rather cut their losses soon and move on to better choices. While buy and holders consider pick and rollers to be impatient, if not irresponsible, pick and rollers think their strategy makes a lot of sense. Why hang onto a stock for 10 years if you see something better to invest in now? Why hang onto an investment that’s simply treading water for decades at a time? Why sit on dead money? Why not take that money and invest it elsewhere in something that is working?

Buy and holders would say such a strategy triggers capital gains taxes and brokerage commissions sooner rather than later. A pick and roller, on the other hand, would argue that these taxes and fees can be overcome by making better underlying investments. Political correctness says it’s important to buy and hold. But even though conventional wisdom says buy and hold is the way to go, the majority of investors don’t really practice buy and hold investing anymore.

Historical odds say it’s harder to pick and roll, on average, than to buy and hold. For starters, by turning over your portfolio frequently with a pick and roll strategy, you create transactional costs such as brokerage commissions and fees (which we will address in greater detail later in the book). These costs make it that much harder for an active investor to beat the averages.

Moreover, it is difficult to time the market perfectly. Long-term studies of the performance of mutual fund investors would seem to bear this out.

The financial research firm Dalbar studied the performance of fund investors (not mutual funds themselves) between January 1984 and December 2002 (Figure 4-7). It found that as a result of poor market timing decisions, the typical fund investor earned only 2.6 percent a year on average during this tremendous bull market period. By comparison, the S&P 500 rose 12.2 per- cent. Why did fund investors perform so poorly? Because many picked the wrong funds and rolled into and out of them at the worst possible times. Again, this is not to say that you can’t do well with this strategy. But the odds of success are low.