Hi Guys,
From the writings of Michael Mauboussin: "We have no control over outcomes, but we can control the process. Of course, outcomes matter, but by focusing our attention on process, we maximize our chances of good outcomes."
A few days ago a rather new MFO participant asked a question that inspired respectably wide and divergent replies, and attracted an even wider viewership. This was somewhat puzzling given the manner by which the subject was introduced: “Why Did Each and Every One of my Funds Beat the Index?”.
Please note that the main thrust of my post is not to be critical of the original poster, but to expand the discussion horizon of the topic. The originating post is merely a point of departure.
The MFO member asserted that all his mutual funds had outdistanced benchmarks for a 15 year period. Although that’s a highly unlikely event, probabilities do not go to zero given the huge number of accessible funds and the even larger number of mutual fund owners with unlimited portfolio construction options. So the claim can not be summarily dismissed.
To paraphrase one of the questions, the new member asked the MFO board to provide some explanations or suggestions for his success story. Stripped of its specific nuances, this is the old is it skill or is it luck conundrum?
By the very way the question was asked, the answer is embedded in the question itself. The new MFO member is baffled by his success. He requested explanatory aid. He identified no methodology in his sorting or selection process. In fact, that process likely morphed over time as the investor acquired some experience. Given these conditions, the most promising guesstimate is that the investor was purely a luck beneficiary.
That’s not a particularly devastating assessment. All investors, at one time or another, have experienced both winning and losing streaks. Since forecasting is an inexact discipline, luck must be an integral part of any outcome equation. But certainly all investors are not equal. The experienced, the informed, the patient, the persistent, the confident, the wealthy investor tilts the odds of winning just a little more in his direction. However, none of this is a rock solid guarantee for excess profits.
Even such an honored and heroic market wizard like Benjamin Graham recognized and adjusted to the changing dynamics of an evolving marketplace. Here is an extended quote from Graham that he enunciated late in his exceptional career:
"I am no longer an advocate of elaborate techniques of security analysis in order to find superior value opportunities. This was a rewarding activity, say, 40 years ago, when our textbook "Graham and Dodd" was first published; but the situation has changed a great deal since then. In the old days any well-trained security analyst could do a good professional job of selecting undervalued issues through detailed studies; but in the light of the enormous amount of research now being carried on, I doubt whether in most cases such extensive efforts will generate sufficiently superior selections to justify their cost. To that very limited extent, I'm on the side of the "efficient market" school of thought now generally accepted by the professors."
Graham modified and documented his thinking on this matter many decades ago. Given the proliferation of financial data, the ease of Internet research, and the overall enhanced knowledge, training, and smartness of present institutional investors, finding undervalued prospects today is a more daunting task.
The referenced contributor apparently used relatively unsophisticated, transitory, and sometimes flawed processes when sorting his way through the mutual fund selection maze. I do not wish to unnecessarily pile-on since many wise and informed MFO participants have already identified these shortcomings in his analysis, but several observations are worth repeating for emphasis and to establish my position on the matter.
Proper benchmark matching is really necessary to score the effectiveness of any investment decision. In general, that rule is violated time and time again. The assertion was for the recent 15-year period. That’s fine except how sensitive are the results to other timeframes? How does any portfolio compare for 5-year, 10-year, and 20-year time periods? An investor should always explore the robustness of his findings against a variety of timeframes.
Most importantly, the decision making process was totally ignored. The discussion merely centered on outcomes, the final score. I believe since future outcomes are unknowable, the process itself should be the focus of attention. As an investor, you control process, you never control outcomes.
That’s why I initiated my post with the Michael Mauboussin quote. You are free to alter the process if the circumstances demand a change; but the decision is always in your wheelhouse. You control process, and you should dutifully document any changes.
I congratulate any investor who assembles a portfolio that outdistances a meaningful, accurate benchmark. I find it amazing that a rather inexperienced investor can select individual portfolio components that each generate excess returns over their respective appropriate benchmarks. Although the odds are decisively against that happening, it does happen. More power to that rare bird. As the song goes “luck be a lady tonight”.
Rather than seeking explanatory help from the general investing population, if I were such an individual, I would be proclaiming the virtues of my methodology, my process. Now that’s the ultimate test. Is the process real and repeatable? Even scientists have been known to distort or falsify data to secure fame or fortune. Sad but true.
Folks tend to focus on successful investors, and often attempt to duplicate their success using similar methods. Frequently, that does not work because luck was a major factor in the outcome. It might be a more rewarding project to examine failures. We can learn far more from a failure analysis than from an ill-defined and morphing set of selection rules. The Space Program Challenger disaster was not fully examined until after the O-ring failure although accumulating evidence had suggested the O-ring sensitivity to low temperature.
I like Michael Mauboussin’s perspectives on investing. Here is a Link to a 36 minute interview conducted with him by the Motley Fool organization:
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/03/01/an-interview-with-behavioral-investing-expert-mich.aspxI hope you enjoy and learn from this probing interchange.
It’s always friendly to offer a little lagniappe (a small gift) after such a lengthy posting. Since luck is an integral part of this posting, perhaps a few thoughts are appropriate.
Under certain circumstances luck is indeed arbitrary and uncontrollable, like being a victim in an earthquake. However, researchers believe that under a large number of circumstances, luck is somewhat controllable and can be improved. Situational awareness, a positive attitude, faith, perseverance, a relaxed personality, an openness to opportunities are several positive luck factors. It’s a complex phenomenon. There are several very popular Luck Factor books available. Here is a Link to a video interview with one renown researcher in this controversial field, Professor Richard Wiseman:
That’s my special lagniappe to you. Wiseman is a very entertaining and engaging fellow; he is also a talented magician. He offers several entertaining oddity-focused presentations on the Internet.
Sorry that I did not participate in the first posting exchange. I just returned from a cruise and needed some catch-up time. Besides, the MFO members who did join the fray did a wonderful and helpful job at uncovering and explaining the salient issues. A hardy attaboy to all; there were many nice, effective contributions. The originating poster showed courage in defending his positions. He too warrants an attaboy.
Also, I really wanted to expand the scope of these original exchanges into the Process and Luck fields.
Best Regards.
Comments
Regards,
Ted
Still, I'll assume that poor Mauboussin is being quoted out of context as badly as Graham, who immediately follows the above quote by giving multiple methods of picking stocks which, he says, had solidly outperformed the market over the preceding decades, high dividend yields and low book values (high b/p) being two of them. The whole interview is easily accessible online. The salient part of that Graham quote is, "To that very limited extent".
And this is probably off topic, but that Graham quote is almost as irritating to me as the constant refrain that Ginger Rogers once said about herself and Fred Astaire: "I did everything he did but backwards and in high heels." She didn't say it, she didn't, and couldn't have, done everything that he did, and the only true effect of the misquote is to obscure her own genuine and remarkable accomplishments as a performer.
Since I've been so churlish so far I might as well finish that way. If I pick a mutual fund that beats the market, I fail to see what good it does to object: Wait! If you compare it to the 'proper benchmark', it doesn't outperform at all. I mean, if I knew what sub-section of the market was going to outperform I could just keep on investing in some etf that covered that sub-section and become richer than Warren Buffet. Unfortunately, I don't know. If I managed to pick some mutual fund manager who did do that, you could say that he was just lucky, but it gets me nowhere to object that I could have just bought some etf which did the same thing the mutual fund did at a lower cost (and maybe in a more pure fashion). I didn't know which etf to buy, and unless my own ignorance is indistinguishable from the mutual fund manager's knowledge, or for that matter his process, doesn't it follow that I'd maximize my outcome by leaving it up to him?
If it's really all luck then only the most general of indexes should be valid, but if that's so then all this talk about "proper benchmarks" is nonsense, there can be only one proper benchmark, the total market. Isn't that so?
Thank you for investing your valuable time to respond to my post. Alternate viewpoints are always welcomed, encouraged, and respected. It’s how a vibrant marketplace works its price discovery magic.
I have never met either Warren Buffett or Benjamin Graham. So my insights into their investment concepts come either from their personal writings, their direct quotes, and/or financial writers interpretations of their perceived wisdom. Certainly my own personal investing proclivities, education, and style influence the manner in which I translate and interpret these various sources. Others will surely internalize divergent takeaways from these same word sources.
I’m very happy that you took time to express your personal opinions. I suspect that you and I will never quite see eye-to-eye on this matter, but that's okay by any standards. Thirty years ago I was a solely active investor. Most recently I decided that passive Index investing offers the likelihood, never the guarantee, of superior portfolio rewards. Therefore, without completely abandoning active fund management, I decided to weight my portfolio much more heavily in the Index direction.
I admire the pugnaciousness and tenacity of active investors. With total disregard for their own efficiency, that cohort makes the overall marketplace a more efficient world with their constant trading. Passive investors gain the advantages of the efficient market without paying the casino croupier. I plan to take full advantage of this almost free lunch. I wish all these energetic active investors the best of luck.
I do insist that I reported the quotes from Mauboussin and Graham without either error or omission. I did not do selective pruning to distort or misrepresent their positions on these important matters.
I like Michael Mauboussin for his multi-discipline investment approach and his explanatory clarity. I do not see the verbal contradictions that you observed. To paraphrase, he said that by concentrating on good process, the likelihood of good results is improved, but without guarantees since outcomes are uncontrollable.
I do not doubt that self-generated contradictions exist. Over time, everyone makes statements that are not totally consistent. I surely do. Warren Buffett has and continues to do so. It is a human failing. I accept these minor inconsistencies and push ahead.
Speaking of Buffett, his current shareholders letter supports many of the insights referenced by Mauboussin and Graham as quoted in my initial posting. Here are two extended extractions from that shareholders letter as summarized in the Motley Fool website:
On the simplest, best investment strategy for individual investors: "My money, I should add, is where my mouth is: What I advise here is essentially identical to certain instructions I've laid out in my will. ... My advice to the trustee could not be more simple: Put 10% of the cash in short-term government bonds and 90% in a very low-cost S&P 500 index fund. (I suggest Vanguard's.) I believe the trust's long-term results from this policy will be superior to those attained by most investors -- whether pension funds, institutions or individuals -- who employ high-fee managers."
And,
On avoiding market (mis)timing: "The 'when' [of investing] is also important. The main danger is that the timid or beginning investor will enter the market at a time of extreme exuberance and then become disillusioned when paper losses occur. (Remember the late Barton Biggs' observation: "A bull market is like sex. It feels best just before it ends.") The antidote to that kind of mistiming is for an investor to accumulate shares over a long period and never to sell when the news is bad and stocks are well off their highs. Following those rules, the 'know-nothing' investor who both diversifies and keeps his costs minimal is virtually certain to get satisfactory results.”
This complete Motley Fool summary is titled “25 Must-Read Quotes from Buffett’s Letter to Shareholders” and is authored by Alex Dumortier. Here is the Link to the entire review:
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/03/08/25-must-read-quotes-from-buffetts-letter-to-shareh.aspx
The investing principles advocated by both Benjamin Graham and his student Warren Buffett have certainly changed over time. Those changes are most likely the result of better informed marketplace participation groups (now mostly smart institutional investors). Although it is often credited to John Maynard Keynes, it is more likely that Professor Paul Samuelson said: “Well when events change, I change my mind. What do you do?”
The Graham extended quote that I referenced was just such a reevaluation of the investor environment and opportunities in the early 1970s. The job of identifying underpriced stocks was simply becoming harder.
I’m a bit bemused how your interpretation of that paragraph differs so dramatically from mine. You ignore the consistent thrust throughout the paragraph and glom onto the innocuous phrase “To that very limited extent" as a salient part that describes his mistrust of passive Index investing. I disagree.
That escape clause was added to simply acknowledge that some investors are superstars and do outperform market average returns. Certainly his students did for years, and when he made those comments, Graham was with a group of these investors. Graham was merely recognizing that the marketplace was more efficient and that finding exceptional undervalued stocks (his cigar butt one-puff theory) was probably beyond the capabilities of most, but not all, investors. This was an unexpected eureka moment in his life that must have shocked Buffett.
The fundamental meaning of the referenced paragraph is abundantly clear: excess returns are more difficult to find. It is definitely not an amateur’s (average investors) game.
I enjoyed your perspective on these topics and thank you again for your thoughtful contribution.
Best Wishes.
Here is an extended quote from Graham that he enunciated late in his exceptional career:
"I am no longer an advocate of elaborate techniques of security analysis in order to find superior value opportunities. This was a rewarding activity, say, 40 years ago, when our textbook "Graham and Dodd" was first published; but the situation has changed a great deal since then. In the old days any well-trained security analyst could do a good professional job of selecting undervalued issues through detailed studies; but in the light of the enormous amount of research now being carried on, I doubt whether in most cases such extensive efforts will generate sufficiently superior selections to justify their cost.
Thank you for your question. When I first read the Graham quote, I too was greatly surprised. I was negligent in not providing a source reference in my original posting; sorry about that.
I’m a fan of Burton Malkiel and have collected a number of his books and papers. I culled the Graham quote from a Financial Review paper that he published in 2005. I file this kind of stuff. Here is a Link to the 9-page article titled “Reflections on the Efficient Market Hypothesis: 30 Years Later”:
http://www.e-m-h.org/Malkiel2005.pdf
The Graham quote is in the Concluding Comments section of this brief document. I suggest you access the paper since it fairly examines the failures of active fund management in terms of returns relative to an appropriate benchmark and the issue of performance inconsistencies (persistence) from top mutual funds. Malkiel’s paper is a breezy and quick read. Enjoy and learn from it.
Malkiel references Graham’s shocking pronouncement as reported in a 1976 edition of the Financial Analyst Journal. Sorry, but I did not backtrack to the primary source. That’s a little sloppy workmanship on my part, but I was simply not motivated enough to fritter away additional time. I do not now fully worship at either Graham or Buffett’s temple of active investing principles or rules. They are human and not Gods.
Benjamin Graham died in 1976. During his long and mostly successful investing history he was a superb survivor because of his flexibility and willingness to learn and adapt to a changing investment environment. He awarded student Buffett an A+ grade at Columbia, but these giants were never in total synch relative to stock selection criteria. Buffett, and especially his partner Charlie Munger, did not subscribe to Graham’s cigar butt buying philosophy. In fact, Graham and Munger violently disagreed on what constitutes a solid company investment.
There is little doubt that Graham changed his investment style and philosophy over time. Who doesn’t do so doesn’t survive. Buffett did. So did John Maynard Keynes. So have I.
Over 55 years I have migrated from individual stocks to mutual funds, from technical charting to value investing, from active fund selections to a preference for passive products, and from daily monitoring to something like quarterly reviews. Indeed, we all change as we learn from study and experience. Otherwise we perish.
I hope you find my reply acceptable. If not, understand that I have broad shoulders and will likely learn from your perspectives.
Best Wishes.
Your postings here are models of thoughtfulness and elegant good manners. Thank you for them.
Graham: "It consists of buying groups of stocks at less than their current or intrinsic values as indicated by one or more simple criteria. The criterion I prefer is seven times the reported earnings for the past 12 months. You can use others--such as current dividend return above seven percent or book value more than 120 percent of price, etc. We are just finishing a performance study of these approaches over the past half-century--1925-1975. They consistently show results of 15 percent or better per annum, or twice the record of the DJIA for this long period. I have every confidence in the threefold merit of this general method based on (a) sound logic, (b) simplicity of application, and (c) an excellent supporting record. At bottom it is a technique by which true investors can exploit the recurrent excessive optimism and excessive apprehension of the speculative public."
The entire short interview is easily accessible on the Graham and Doddsville site.
thanks very much!
Found it, but not on the website you mentioned.
I found it here:
http://www.cabafx.com/trading-ebooks-collection/newpdf/Benjamin Graham, Building a Profession_ - Jason Zweig.pdf
It is in a book titled Benjamin Graham Building A Profession
Pages 265-271, chapter title: A Conversation With Benjamin Graham
I'm reading it right now
"I hope you find my reply acceptable. If not, understand that I have broad shoulders and will likely learn from your perspectives".
Yes MJG, I found your reply to be excellent, as well as your detailed and well thought out posts that I have been reading for some time.
I know you favor indexing, and I have been reading a lot about this investing 'method' recently, and it has tremendous merits. I have lost most of my faith in the ability to identify mutual funds and managers who will beat the market going forward.
I would value your opinion on the asset classes you think that an indexed investor would be wise in including in a portfolio.
Let's take an example where an investor is going to 'procure' his entire US Stock market investment from the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index fund, and his entire Foreign Stock investment from the Vanguard Total International Stock Market Index fund (with the exception of possibly adding REITS, below).
Do you think a REIT index fund (such as VNQ) belongs in the average portfolio, and at what weighting, or if you prefer, what % of the total stock weighting?
Same question for a REIT non-US index fund (such as VGRLX).
What bond market indexes do you favor in a portfolio, and at what % each of the total fixed income allocation? (e.g., total bond mkt index vs. short vs. intermediate treasury index vs. short term or intermediate term corporate index).
Do you think high yield/junk bonds belong in the typical portfolio? A bank loan fund as part of the fixed income allocation?
Any other asset classes, e.g, a small % in a commodities ETF or gold ETF like GLD or IAU, as an insurance policy?
thanks MJG
Thank you for the kind words and your trust in asking help from me. I am hesitant that I can profitably satisfy your request..
I struggle with giving specific investment advice. Please know that I am an amateur in the investment jungle. I truly believe that a number of MFO members are far more qualified than I am to give such advice. It has been my consistent policy not to make specific portfolio recommendations here at MFO and elsewhere. I fear I might do more harm than good.
There is another reason that giving and accepting internet advice is a dangerous thing. That task requires a careful and continuous interchange between the parties involved. That’s difficult to do well with only e-mail exchanges.
Direct contact with professional advisors could be useful. An advisor who uses Index products to implement his approach might serve your needs. There are just too many variables to integrate into final decisions when exchanging posts on the internet.
Since I’m a self-taught investor my financial education has developed in a haphazard manner. Therefore, there are likely some holes in my knowledge base that could compromise the performance of my portfolio as well as any that I choose to help construct with others.
Therefore, I choose to abstain. But I have no reservations about suggesting generic sources and approaches.
For example, I do admire some of the Index portfolios that have been documented by Paul Farrell in his Lazy-Man portfolios. I am especially drawn to several portfolios because they include elements that academic and industry research suggests can modestly increase expected returns while simultaneously reducing portfolio volatility. These portfolios have been frequently discussed on MFO, but here is the Link to Farrell’s ongoing scorekeeping:
http://www.marketwatch.com/lazyportfolio
I am attracted to David Swensen’s Yale U’s Unconventional portfolio. It seems to touch most of the necessary bases with a small number of Index products. Here is the sub-link that presents Swensen’s Index choices:
http://www.marketwatch.com/lazyportfolio
I also like Bill Bernstein’s slightly more complex Smart Money portfolio as follows:
http://www.marketwatch.com/lazyportfolio/portfolio/bernsteins-smart-money
Using the Farrell Lazy portfolios as a point of departure you get to pick from a bunch of respectable options. I know you recognize that this listing gets you to a reasonable starting line. Adjustments in holdings and percentages should be made to accommodate your special circumstances: Your age, wealth, education, experience, risk profile, and end objectives.
Along that line of thought, I have been recently introduced to some mutual fund research conducted by Professor Craig Israelsen. He has expanded his work to formulate an Index-based fund strategy that exploits study findings. For example his portfolios are age dependent. His work is called the 7twelve approach.
The 7twelve approach uses 12 fund groups to execute 7 fund asset classes. Eight diversifying fund groups are assigned to 4 equity classes while four fund groups flush out 3 fixed income classes. Here is a Link to this attractive portfolio organizational option:
http://www.7twelveportfolio.com/Downloads/7Twelve-Model-Intro.pdf
I suggest you explore the Lazy and the 7twelve candidate portfolio options. These might satisfy your requirements.
Please understand that I still own a substantial mix of active and passive funds (50/50 at this juncture). I do plan to convert to a more passive portfolio (probably like a 20/80 mix) within the next year. That’s a task that awaits execution.
At this juncture, I directly own no gold products, but I just might diversify a little more following general guidelines extracted from the references that I provided..
By now you realize that I am a plain vanilla, meat and potatoes type investor. I believe that simplicity works best, and that complexity kills. My portfolio reflects that philosophy. It works for me; it might not be your cup of tea. This thinking goes a long way to explain my reluctance to participate in specific mutual fund recommendations.
Other very qualified MFO Board participations will enthusiastically fill my void.
Good Luck and Best Wishes.
I've been taking the Robert Shiller Coursera offering on Financial Markets lately and watching the full lectures at the Yale site. Amongst other things, Shiller is very much a student of the history of thought. He walks you through the history of the EMT in lecture 7.
Shiller is also terrific at damning with faint praise. My favorite moment here is when he talks of Malkiel popularizing the EMT in A Random Walk Down Wall Street. Shiller tells how he met Malkiel at a cocktail party and asked for some references concerning technical analysis Malkiel cites in the book but did not footnote. Malkiel is subsequently unable to come up with even one. Shiller then goes on to suggest an alternative to the Random Walk model using first-order regression analysis.
I also particularly enjoy Shiller's deconstruction of Fama when discussing the joint Nobel Prizes on the "Week 2 Bonus" at Coursera (can't link): "There are differences in our concept of rationality."
Which leads to the Graham quote. First, it seems to me that Graham is saying simply that his system as presented in Security Analysis is probably too complex to be useful for the average retail investor. He urges most people to be "defensive investors" in The Intelligent Investor. However, if you wish to be more aggressive, he mentions some very simple valuation methods which might increase returns like Yield and Book Value. Second, Graham is speaking from the vantage point of the 1970s, when Efficient Market Theory was treated as something of a groundbreaking truth. As Shiller points out, beginning in the 1980s, that "truth" begins to be seriously challenged in the academy. Graham didn't live to see that.
Speaking of Swenson, he makes a guest appearance in the class to discuss the Yale Model and criticisms of it in Lecture 6. He also makes it clear that he feels active investors can outperform (of course he would, his job depends on that), but that you have to be all active or all passive (by this he doesn't mean active or passive funds, but something akin to Graham's defensive/enterprising split), because to try to tread the line leads to behavioral mistakes. To be fair, he does cite some research looking at efficiency of markets based on manager return, with domestic equities well down the list.
The bottom line is that the original poster may or may not have been lucky, but his funds likely beat equity indices (or, more likely, U.S. market indices) over the past 15 years because markets are far less than perfectly efficient, and equity indices have had a lousy last 15 years, lowlighted by two bubbles and the worst economic recession since the 1930s. Many actively managed funds outperformed during that period by playing defense during the tech bubble and in 2008. That is something you can only get with active equity selection or successful market timing.
And when you return that to process, it is unclear to me how being a passive index investor stops you from making the same mistakes that hurt every investor's portfolio. Several MFO posters, most notably BobC, have pointed out that defensive equity funds enable skittish retail investors to curtail bad habits. The average holding period for a stock is now 5 days. I would agree that many active funds do little better, which is a major contributing cause to underperformance. But if that is the mindset, and if market-cap indices are by nature subject to bubbles and crashes, it seems likely to me that they also encourage bad investor behavior which more staid funds might avoid.
At the end of the day, though, talking about process is one thing. But you can't simply reduce it to active vs. passive when there are so many moving parts: Asset allocation; buy and hold vs. momentum; dividend reinvestment; limiting behavioral mistakes; leveraging; risk tolerance; time horizons; et al. These all make up process, and shouldn't be lost in EMT noise. It seems to me far more important investors come up with a reasonable plan that suits them and follow it.
I find striking similarities between the advocacy of passive investing and celibacy (humans are too weak to resist the temptation otherwise as we "know from history", denial of the downside of the suggested path such as increased transgressions when forced to be so, puritanical view of the alternate, appeal to authority, etc) with pretty much the same logic, exhortation, rationalization of personal small transgressions, etc.
Amusing to read and see the parallels every time while staying out of the debate.
Nonetheless, based on solid recommendations from friends, co-workers and some sharp people at Fund Alarm, I ended up with most of my retirement savings invested with three very good houses: T. Rowe Price, Dodge & Cox, and Oakmark. So, any "success" I may have enjoyed came not from my skills or from Lady Luck, but from the fine managers these firms hire and cultivate to manage people's money. Oh well ... there were those recommendations I mentioned. So I'd suggest that one critical place where luck comes into play in all our lives is in the associations we happen into - be if through our places of work or in other haphazard ways.
Where I'd really enjoy continued exploration of this overriding theme is in how people think luck, skill, or other factors impacted the results achieved by some prominent money managers. On the positive side I'd cite the legendary John Templeton and Peter Lynch. It's funny, but during his active years I never thought of Templeton as lucky or skillful - though suppose he was both. No, instead I viewed him as an eternal optimist who believed the human condition would continue to improve around the world and that this continuous improvement would somehow lift the value of good solid companies along the way. Don't remember Lynch quite as well - but always felt he was largely a very lucky fella who happened to be in the right place at the right time. Though, no doubt he possessed a certain degree of skill. For a hapless sole, I'll cite John Hussman, who has managed largely only to loose money for his investors over the past decade. Now, has Hussman been unlucky, unskillful or both? Or is there, perhaps, a totally different reason for his lack of success?
Quote: "The fault Dear Brutus is not in our stars ..."