5 lessons from the best investing speech

Surprise! The best investing speech I've ever come across is not from Warren Buffett or other well-known investing legends such as Peter Lynch, Benjamin Graham, or John Neff. It's from the little-known Dean Williams. 

The speech, Trying Too Hard, was delivered 38 years ago in 1981, when Williams was with Batterymarch Financial Management. But its content remains as relevant as ever. Here are five gems I took away from Williams' timeless speech.

1.  CONFIDENCE AND ACCURACY

"Confidence in a forecast rises with the amount of information that goes into it. But the accuracy of the forecast stays the same."

Keep this in mind the next time you come across a market forecaster who is highly confident just because he's backed by mountains of data. Bad data, however much the amount, can lead to bad forecasts. A poor understanding of how markets work (such as assuming that price movements in the financial markets follow a normal distribution) will also lead to toxic outcomes even when there's plenty of data involved.

In fact, research by Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at Berkeley, brings this Dean Williams quote one step further by suggesting that confidence and accuracy in a forecast can often be inversely correlated.

2. DON'T JUST DO SOMETHING, STAND THERE! 

"The title Marshall mentioned, "Trying Too Hard", comes from something that happened to me a few years ago. I had just completed what I thought was some fancy footwork involving buying and selling a long list of stocks. The oldest member of Morgan's trust committee looked down the list and said, "Do you think you might be trying too hard?" At the time I thought, "Who ever heard of trying too hard?" Well, over the years I have changed my mind about that."

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Finance professors Brad Barber and Terry Odean published a paper in 2000 that looked at the trading records of more than 66,000 US households over a five-year period from 1991 to 1996.

The research was astonishing: The households who traded the most generated the lowest returns. The average household earned 16.4 per cent per year for the timeframe under study, while the most frequent traders only earned 11.4 per cent per year.

Investor William Smead once said that "Your common stock portfolio is like a bar of soap. The more you rub it, the smaller it gets." How true.

3. WE KNOW LESS THAN WE THINK WE DO

"Here are the ideas I'm going to talk about: the first is an analogy between physics and investing… The foundation of Newtonian physics was that physical events are governed by physical laws. Laws that we could understand rationally. And if we learned enough about those laws, we could extend our knowledge and influence over our environment. 

That was also the foundation of most of the security analysis, technical analysis, economic theory and forecasting methods you and I learned about when we first began in this business.

There were rational and predictable economic forces. And if we just tried hard enough… If we learned every detail about a company. . . .If we discovered just the right variables for out forecasting models… Earnings and prices and interest rates should all behave in rational and predictable ways. If we just tried hard enough.

In the last fifty years a new physics came along. Quantum, or subatomic physics. The clues it left along its trail frustrated the best scientific minds in the world. Evidence began to mount that our knowledge of what governed events on the subatomic level wasn't nearly what we thought it would be.

Those events just didn't seem subject to rational behaviour or prediction. Soon it wasn't clear whether it was even possible to observe and measure subatomic events, or whether the observing and measuring were, themselves, changing or even causing those events.

What I have to tell you tonight is that the investment world I think I know anything about is a lot more like quantum physics than it is like Newtonian physics. There is just too much evidence that our knowledge of what governs financial and economic events isn't nearly what we thought it would be."

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Investing involves human psychology, which is incredibly hard to model. The great physicist Richard Feynman apparently once said "Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had emotions." That's the problem we as investors have to deal with. 

Investing is not always a case of "if X, then Y." According to a study done in 2004, South Africa's economy expanded by 6.5 per cent annually from 1900 to 2002, but saw its stock market rise by less than 1 per cent.

The Federal Reserve in the US started its bond-purchase programme, Quantitative Easing, in 2008.

Investors thought back then that interest rates would rise when QE stopped since the Fed's massive presence would be gone. QE officially ended in late 2014 but the Fed had stopped and restarted QE on a number of occasions.

Morgan Housel showed that, contrary to the general idea, interest rates rose each time the Fed stopped QE between the beginning of 2008 and April 2013.

The good thing is you and I need not be helpless. We can work with sound investing principles that are backed by strong logical reasoning and evidence, and we can invest with humility by diversifying. 

4. THE POWER OF SIMPLICITY AND CONSISTENCY

"You are familiar with the periodic rankings of past investment results published in Pension & Investment Age. You may have missed the news that for the last ten years the best investment record in the country belonged to the Citizens Bank and Trust Company of Chillicothe, Missouri.

Forbes magazine did not miss it, though, and sent a reporter to Chillicothe to find the genius responsible for it. He found a 72 year old man named Edgerton Welsh, who said he'd never heard of Benjamin Graham and didn't have any idea what modern portfolio theory was. "Well, how did you do it?" the reporter wanted to know.

Mr. Welch showed the report his copy of Value-Line and said he bought all the stocks ranked "1" that Merrill Lynch or E.F. Hutton also liked. And when any one of the three changed their ratings, he sold. Mr. Welch said, "It's like owning a computer. When you get the printout, use the figures to make a decision-not your own impulse."

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The Forbes reporter finally concluded, "His secret isn't the system but his own consistency." EXACTLY. That is what Garfield Drew, the market writer, meant forty years ago when he said, "In fact, simplicity or singleness of approach is a greatly underestimated factor of market success.""

I've previously shared in The Good Investors about how a simple portfolio of US stocks, international stocks, and global bonds have bested even the best-performing endowment funds of US colleges that invests in incredibly complex ways.

Here's another good one, according to Morgan Housel: "Someone who bought a low-cost S&P 500 index fund in 2003 earned a 97 per cent return by the end of 2012… Meanwhile, the average equity market neutral fancy-pants hedge fund lost 4.7 per cent of its value over the same period, according to data from Dow Jones Credit Suisse Hedge Fund Indices."

5. INVESTING WITHOUT FORECASTS

"And when it comes to forecasting-as opposed to doing something-a lot of expertise is no better than a little expertise. And may even be worse.

The consolation prize is pretty consoling, actually. It's that you can be a successful investor without being a perpetual forecaster. Not only that, I can tell you from personal experience that one of the most liberating experiences you can have is to be asked to look over your firm's economic outlook and to say, "We don't have one."

Successful investing can be done without paying attention to economic forecasts. I have been investing for more than 9 years, and have never depended on outlooks on the economy. My focus has always been on a stock's underlying business fundamentals.

It's the same when I was with the Motley Fool Singapore's investing team - the prospects of a stock's business was our primary concern. In his speech, Dean Williams also said "Give life a try without forecasts." I have tried, and it's been great. 

This article was first published in The Good Investor.

All content is displayed for general information purposes only and does not constitute professional financial advice.