Quote from nazzdack:
If a rookie were to lose 25% to 50% of assets, recovery would be difficult if not impossible. If Fisher or Buffett were to do the same thing, people ignore it and say the usual B.S about concentrating on the long-term.
I guess you're saying that's wrong then for people who are prepared to take a long term view??
I know BRK stock fell 45% from March 99 to March 00. If you're right, and stockholders sold out because of this short term performance, they'd have missed 265% increase since then. Surely for them, focussing on the long term and belief in the skills of WB and co would have been the right option?
In terms of my "brainwashing" to focus on relative returns and a comment about 5 year performance I can state the following.
Long short hedge fund average return 5.02% last 5 years.
Fund of funds average return 6.4% last 5 years. Source TASS.
My Fisher portfolio 11.3% per annum.
So a small down year does not bother me. I also hold some absolute return funds and some highly agressive funds as well as a trading portfolio. Part of balanced portfolio. Unlike the other Einsteins here, I prefer to spread my funds as I know that some will tank at some point.
To the plonker who says Fisher got lucky, he may well have. Being lucky and right over a 30 year career is pretty good though. That's one of the reasons he's been able to build a business that makes him a billionaire I guess. And he's not always been long either, short Nasdog and Russell late 2000, all 2001, part 2002. Don't know where you got $30 dollar oil from.
Some of his forbes colums are pretty diasasterous, something KF usually notes himself. The Asain one was interesting. Where you say he was urging investing there right before the collaspe, you are almost right. Never let the facts get in the way of a good bias. If you'd have bought those stocks, they made an average gain of close to 50% over the next couple of months. A trailing stop would have kept you out of trouble, no?
Even if you still held them now, they have beaten the market.
Check out the ones recommended in the housing article. Again, if you ran a stoploss on the housing ones, I'm guessing you would have been out on losses anywhere between 10-25%. The other ones gave such good gains that if you ran a trailing stop, you came out of the whole episode with good gains. That's one of the benefits of being long versus short, infinate gains vs a fixed loss. AGU was up 225% at it's high.
Again, even if you held them all till now, your loss is 9.1%. Better than the market.
This is turning into a KF defense, it's not meant to be. As someone already noted, these guys are longer term investors, not traders. I'm simply trying to show that the information can be interpeted many ways. Someone wanted to pick 2 articles which really sucked. That's fine, but you make yourself look a little dumb if don't assess what was being presented in it's proper context.
Go Ken, go Warren, go Bill
Ciao
