By Palladiem
Investing is challenging enough when you devote 100% of your time to it – anything less, and you’re courting failure. Markets are complex and swift moving, noise levels are high, and competition is intense. As an adviser, you likely spend a great portion of your time helping clients define goals, playing counselor, or managing your business. Consequently, what may be your too often neglected investment approach needs to contain both a solid framework and apply a strict discipline to best position your clients’ portfolios (and you) for success.
Most successful advisers have, or rely on managers who have, a common structure to their investment approach comprised of:
- A well-defined investment philosophy that serves as the foundation for a solid and sustainable investment process
- The investment process is well supported by empirical evidence including actual portfolio results, academic research and passes a common sense sniff test
- The approach should capture elements of both investor and market behavior (momentum) and long-term investment fundamentals (valuation)
- Execution of the investment process over time should demonstrate consistency but also be adaptive during changing market environments.
A well-defined and repeatable investment process is usually predicated on a common set of core beliefs. It’s our view that over longer-term periods, beginning valuations have been the strongest indicator of future performance. 30-year forward returns are significantly higher on average when investing at 10x earnings as opposed to 20x earnings.1For equities, valuation can be measured multiple ways: price-to-earnings (historical or forward earnings), price-to-book value, price-to-sales, price-to-cash flow, price-to-vix, etc . In the bond market, the current level of interest rates, the slope of the yield curve, and credit spreads are decent indicators of where the bond market is currently valued.
In the shorter term, however, many more factors can influence market behavior, often in competing ways. These can include earnings expectations, macroeconomic data, tax and regulatory policies, fiscal and monetary policies, among others. Momentum and large scale investor behavior driven by emotion can also have powerful effects. Swift changes in these factors, make constant and consistent monitoring a requirement if you want to separate trend from noise.
Related: With This Hand, The Fed Should Check Rather Than Raise
We also believe that successful long-term investing requires patience, focus, and diligent attention to the management of controllable factors such as fees and taxes. If unchecked, these elements can erode away headline returns, and put achievement of client financial goals in serious jeopardy.
To best serve your investors, an investment philosophy should be aligned with, and directed toward, delivering meaningful financial outcomes for investors. Manage investments with purpose: to meet a future financial obligation or aspiration.
After decades of experience evaluating, monitoring, and managing other investment managers, in our view the tenets of a solid investment philosophy include:
- Insight-driven inputs
- adhering to a long-term perspective
- applying control where possible
- being innovative with a willingness to adapt
- developing the ability to manage risk beyond volatility, and
- adopting a forward-looking view rather than relying on the recent past when formulating capital market assumptions.
In our next contribution, we will explore each of these elements in more detail, and describe how to construct a unified whole in pursuit of client investment objectives.
Palladiem is the advisor-centric investment firm; we provide targeted support and insight to advisers. We manage diversified, multi-asset class investment strategies designed to meet a wide range of investor risk/return objectives, supported by our proprietary investment process, forward looking views, capital markets analysis, and alternatives and investment manager research.
This article was contributed by Palladiem, a participant in the ETF Strategist Channel.
Sources:
1. “Valuations Matter – Even for Millennial Investors”, Real Investment Advice, February 23, 2017.