January 26, 2017 We wanted to quickly highlight some cool research from StarCapital, a German investment firm, showing how well global value investing worked in 2016. What the folks at StarCapital did was to sort 40 countries by their beginning-of-2016 stock market valuation, and then …
The futility of “headline investing”
January 18, 2017 Excerpted from a letter sent to clients on January 18, 2017 We've often argued that trying to invest based on economic and political current events what we call "headline investing" — is unlikely to work well. (The reasons are many; a good refresher can be …
Will Value Investing Rise Again?
September 19, 2016 Does value investing still work? It's a reasonable question, given the tough stretch that value-based asset allocators have faced over the past several years (at least up until this year, which has so far been quite a good one for Team Value). GMO's Ben Inker …
Presidential Elections and the Stock Market
July 29, 2016 Excerpted from a letter sent to clients on July 12, 2016. Our view on "headline" news events is that while they can certainly have an impact on markets, that impact is impossible to reliably predict, and is often short-lived in any case. Presidential elections seem to fit …
Brexit’s Aftermath
July 14, 2016 Excerpted from a letter sent to clients on July 12, 2016. The post-"Brexit" panic seems to have fizzled out almost as quickly as it came on: global stock markets are now higher than the day before the UK voted to leave the European Union.1 In our last letter, sent …
The “Rising Tide” and Our Investments
May 22, 2015 This is a follow-up to our prior article, The Rising Tide of Economic Progress, and Why it's Rarely “Different This Time.” Here's a quick recap: "Stocks" are not just numbers on a screen — they represent partial ownership of businesses, including a share of all future …
Why own emerging markets
January 6, 2016 Excerpted from a letter sent to clients on January 6, 2016 "Every great investment started out as a perfectly good investment that went against you." — GMO's Ben Inker, on value investing Our emerging markets investments were the main cause of our portfolio pain this …
The Rising Tide of Economic Progress, and Why it’s Rarely “Different This Time”
February 12, 2015 It seems like many people think of stocks simply in terms of their prices, as if stocks are just numbers on a screen that go up or down. Perhaps that's a useful simplification for day traders, but for long-term investors the reality is different: a stock represents …
This Chart Pretty Much Sums It Up
August 28, 2014 We recently came across a great chart showing valuations for the stock markets of the US (blue line), developed international countries (orange line), and emerging market countries (green line): To clarify, the chart isn't tracking performance, but …
Values vs. Headlines, and the State of Global Stock Valuations
November 18, 2013 The article below is excerpted from a letter sent to clients on October 14, 2013. (Yes, we are just now getting around to posting it on the website). For some context, the letter was sent in the midst of widespread concern about the government shutdown and the debt ceiling …