Stick to your knitting

There are many ways to invest, but, what's more important than any particular method you choose to is whether you stick to it.

One fundamental choice is passive or active. Passive investing is investing with the market. This method is agnostic about market value and broadly diversified. It's low cost and tends to beat most active managers, but can go through long periods of poor absolute returns, like we've seen over the last 12 years. If you don't want to search hard for superior investors and can't stand being out-of-step with other people, then passive is probably your best approach.

Be careful, though, not to waffle between passive and active. More important than your choice of passive or active is whether you can and will stick to your choice. Those who switch between passive and active do worse than those who stick to either passive or active.

Active is investing differently than the general market in an attempt to beat market returns. This is very difficult to do, but if you can find a superior money manager, it can make a huge difference in your long term wealth. Once again, you must stick with the approach for it to work, and this will be hard to do when your active manager is out-of-step with the market, under-performing the market, and charging you higher fees than passive investing. Once again, if you switch back and forth between passive and active, you will do worse than either approach.

Within active, there are several approaches, too. There's macro investing: trying to bet on economic trends in the attempt to have exposure to the best sectors or countries. There's market timing: trying to anticipate market sentiment and buy when things go up and sell before they go down. There's growth: trying to buy the fastest growing companies to beat overall market growth. There's value: trying to buy companies selling at the lowest price to underlying fundamentals. Value has the best long term performance, but even it goes long periods of under-performance between bouts of out-performance.  

I'm going to risk sound like a broken record, but it's too important not to emphasize again: it matters less whether you choose value, growth, marketing timing or macro, and more whether you stick to it. Value may out-perform over the long run, but it won't work if you try to do it when it's "working" and try to do the other methods when they're "working." The academic and anecdotal research on this is unequivocal, people who try to switch methods at just the right time grossly under-perform those who stick to one method consistently.

I'm a dyed-in-the-wool value investor, I'll readily admit, because it works better than the other options. To succeed, though, I have to stick to it in good times and bad, not just when it's "working."

If you want good investment results, pick your method and stick to it. Though some work better than others, nothing works as poorly as trying to switch between them.

Nothing in this blog should be considered investment, financial, tax, or legal advice. The opinions, estimates and projections contained herein are subject to change without notice. Information throughout this blog has been obtained from sources believed to be accurate and reliable, but such accuracy cannot be guaranteed.