Evidence Based Investing
In medical science, based on research, you are able to find ways to give the patient the highest possibility to reaching their goals of healing themselves. In financial science, based on research, you are able to use historical data to give the investor the highest possibility to reaching their long term retirement goals.
“We want to help you to reduce speculation and give you more wealth and peace of mind.”
Some of the myths
1.Investing is gambling.
However, if you look at capitalism and how it works, markets reward disciplined investors who are willing to stick through the longer period of investing time frame. Ownership into shares of a diversified pool of profitable companies that can generate future cashflows for many many years allows value to be created. Innovation and the need to want a better life through basic human consumption also leads to the value of companies increasing.
2. Timing is everything.
The advertisements and news of sensation sell. When to buy, what to buy, when to sell, what to sell… The evidence is that trading can be costly, both financially and even more so emotionally for you and your family.
3. Superior skill leads to better performance
It has been shown based on data that there are few professionals who actually beat the market. If professionals are finding it hard to do it, what more for an individual investor who does this for his own retirement? It has been evidenced that most individual investors underperform the market by a huge margin due to human behaviour and biases over the long term.
Since markets reward investors for taking risks, one of the primary decisions in designing your investment portfolio is to determine which risks to take and why you are taking it.
Academic research has identified several characteristics, or risk factors, that drive stock and bond returns. Eg, equity, value, small and profitable companies.
Each of these factors has been shown to increase the return of a portfolio. For example, the equity premium says that stocks tend to outperform bonds. That doesn’t mean that everyone should only own stocks. While stocks tend to perform better than bonds, they are also much riskier, and usually shouldn’t be used for short-term needs.
Our job is to help our clients formulate a strategy that exposes them to the appropriate risks to help them meet their personal goals, depending on their time horizon.