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“Market timing” is just investment jargon that means trying to decide where a market or a particular security currently is, where it may be going, and when. Trying is the key word here.

Market timing, including all forms of charting, waves, and "technical analysis," doesn't work because nobody can predict the future, period. The future prices of stocks, asset classes, or any market (e.g., interest rates), cannot be predicted from charts of past prices, wave theories, econometric models, historical trends, computer programs, statistical relationships that worked in the past, or any other method. Markets move in response to millions of participants acting on random daily news, by trading securities, none of which can be predicted.

To win at the market timing game, one needs to be correct more than 75% of the time to break even with mistakes, transaction costs, and taxes¹. Because few people have shown a consistent track record of being correct even more than they are incorrect, this practice is an exercise in futility. Only one in four timers beats the market two years in a row, and only one in eight three years in a row². Results of empirical studies also show that only one in 37 mutual funds showed any benefit from market timing.³

The main reason market timing doesn't work is because you have to make four decisions every time it's used. You would have to be correct in four calls to make high enough of a return to justify the risks.

First, you have to pick what's "up" (and will go down in the future, or why sell it?) for the sell decision to raise the money to buy what you think will go up in the future. Then you need to know when to sell it. Then you need to know what's "down" (and will go up in the future, or why buy it?), and when to buy it. All it takes is to be wrong on one of the four calls to wipe out the profits from other three calls. The chances of all of this netting out to a profit after taxes and trading costs are slim to none (and Slim left town).

If someone could market time with as little as 65% accuracy, they'd be on the front page of every newspaper every day, and there would be more than just a handful of firms practicing market timing. Everyone you see on TV, or in magazines/newspapers, predicting the future is just guessing.

Some are just trying to convince you to buy the stocks/asset classes they just bought so they'll go up, and they can sell out at a profit. Why else would their clients, who are paying stiff fees, tolerate their manager going on TV and giving away free advice they have to pay for? It's their job to convince you they can predict the future so they can move their products and sell their services. Over time, their "mistakes" will lose you way more money than their lucky calls will make you money.

Even gurus like Jim Cramer that have their own show are just guessing. On the first week of March 2008, he said to not sell Bear Stearns, after reading a concerned viewer's letter which read, "Should I be concerned about Bear Stearn's in terms of liquidity problem, and get my money out of there?" Cramer replied in his usual tirade, "No no no! Bear Stearns is fine.... Don't move your money from Bear, that's just silly...." The stock went from $80 to $2 overnight two weeks later (and was $171 a year before).

This is all you need to know about market timing, technical analysis/charting, and what to believe from the financial media (when it comes to predicting the future) to be a successful investor!

1: The New Finance, Robert A. Haugen, page 13
2: Managing Investment Portfolios, Donald L. Tuttle Chapter 13, page 36
3: Modern Portfolio Theory and Investment Analysis, Edwin J. Elton and Martin Gruber. Page 653

Security Selection

“Security selection” is investment jargon that means choosing one investment over another. Stock picking is the most well known form of security selection. The most common example is just thinking that something will “go up.” Most thoughtful security selection decisions are made within the same asset class - in other words, deciding which stock, bond, or mutual fund to purchase compared to others of the same type. But most are random guesses based on intuition.

Here is the difference between security selection and asset allocation: Deciding to have 20% in large cap U.S. growth stocks is an asset allocation decision. Choosing Microsoft over Intel, to represent this 20%, would be a security selection decision.

Security selection (e.g., stock picking) can only be done effectively by mutual fund managers who concentrate all of their efforts on a small segment of a market (like tech stocks). Even then, most have marginal records, unless you know how to find the good ones by screening mutual funds.

And funds can only do it well if they stay focused on one asset class. That's why fund objectives like Blend, Global, Balanced, All-cap, Target, Life Style, Hybrid, and Growth and Income, seldom get good results. They just can't maintain the focus needed to be superior stock pickers because they're trying to do too much at once (by working with more than one asset class).

There are just too many stocks, too much news, and it all happens way too fast to cope with. Company news comes out of nowhere and could bring a stock down by half in days - before anything can be done about it. That's way too risky, so individuals, and financial professionals that manage money for clients, should not waste time trying to pick stocks. But they love to do it because it's fun to be a "player on Wall Street."

We practice only a little bit of security selection by using Morningstar database software to screen mutual funds. This helps us find ones we like and eliminate those we don’t like. We use security selection techniques here because funds that are consistently highly ranked in their category over short, intermediate, and long periods of time tend to remain highly ranked over time.

The managers of funds that pass our screens just had (and hopefully will continue to have) a superior way of selecting securities and deciding when to buy and sell them (market timing). These managers devote their full attention to security selection and market timing in a narrow segment of a market. We feel keeping this narrow focus is about the only way security selection and market timing can produce benefits after transaction costs.

When it comes to individual stock picking outside the environment of large institutional investors that focus on a small segment of a market, like mutual funds, most empirical studies have shown that security selection techniques add little value. Some reasons for this are:

· There are too many stocks to pick from. With 10,000+ stocks in the U.S., where do you start?

· There is too little information available from the companies, most are just estimates, and it’s quickly outdated. As Enron showed us, even data right from the firm can be wrong for many reasons.

· There is usually not enough time to do an adequate analysis of all of the important facts.

· Things change on a daily basis. News could come from anywhere, anytime, and could change your gains into huge losses in just a few hours. The point is, a stock could turn before you find out and have time to do something about it. Mutual funds typically own so many stocks that even if one got torpedoed into worthlessness overnight, the fund would still have most of its value.

· The only people who have the data needed to forecast a stock's future price are the people who work at/for/or with the company - and they can't tell anyone because they'd go to jail by breaking insider trading laws. Everyone else is just guessing with incomplete pieces of outdated estimated data. Mutual funds don't have inside information, but have the resources to be the best at guessing (just buying a good software package for screening stocks runs around $25,000 per year).

· The main reason the art of security selection is so difficult is because so many qualified people are in the market on a daily basis doing essentially the same thing. So in effect, these folks have actually become the market. It’s hard to beat yourself over time, so last year’s superstar just becomes this year’s dog by making a few little mistakes.

· It's humanly impossible to find the time, money, and other resources needed to both manage client's assets in a way to get the results clients need and expect, and keep up with thousands of stocks on a daily basis. They may get lucky here and there, but over time the losses of their "mistakes" will greatly outweigh their lucky picks. Successful professional stock pickers either make their own mutual fund, or are hired by mutual funds, because that's where the real fun and money is.

· The biggest problem with security selection is knowing when to sell. Nobody likes selling a "great company." You don't need to be a CFA Charterholder to know when a stock you've been following will go up. Just wait for accelerating earnings growth - stocks usually go up after that. But that's usually when they are at peak prices.

This is usually when people buy because they feel "it's safe now that it's going up." But that's usually when it's time to sell. Nobody wants to sell anything that's going up, so they wait to try to get a few more bucks out of it. That's when it goes back down before they can sell it. Then the investor goes into denial - which usually results in holding it forever because they don't want to take a loss. You want to buy stocks when the news is bad, and sell them when the news is good. But this is the opposite of what most people actually do in the real world.

· Recommendations by "research departments" of major brokerage houses rarely get superior results because their stock picks are frequently biased toward firms they have investment banking relationships with (they are under constant pressure to move stock and bond inventory on the deals their firm underwrote), not to mention their numerous other conflicts of interest.

Then there's the conflicts of interest with analysts who give stock recommendations. They can only give "buy" recommendations, or the company will get mad and stop giving them information. And they're not going to tell you when it's time to sell a stock their firm has other (investment banking) relationships with, because they'd get fired. And they don't like downgrading stocks because it makes them look stupid for recommending it in the first place. The regulators are making progress with this, but it's still years off.

The bottom line is that even the best stock pickers tend to lag the market over time. For these reasons, we don’t think security selection should be emphasized in investment portfolio management.

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