HI I found interesting link New TripleMe Search good search engine for traders
lifegauge
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While this is a different topic altogether, I'd like to hear why you will always believe that "less is more"? When running a business, when running a hedge fund, when running a portfolio, when trading your own money, less is not always more.
I think the more informed you are will put you in a better position to make right decisions. Of course, "less is more" is another way to say "tell me what I need to know because I don't want to filter information on my own".
two cents.
I think the more informed you are will put you in a better position to make right decisions. Of course, "less is more" is another way to say "tell me what I need to know because I don't want to filter information on my own".
two cents.
BSD
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Oh believe me, less is definitely always more once you understand what is relevant to success, which normally isn't the hardest endeavour ...
Be it in trading, be it in business, etc etc.
Undue complexity is little more than an excuse for feeble minds that fail to cut to the chase, that fail to unearth the success relevant factors from amidst all the irrelevant noise, that thoroughly fail to understand that it's pretty much always 20% of input that generates 80% of output, which is really all you need to concentrate on to achieve outstanding success.
Testimony to the less is more concept is usually to be found where outstanding success is to be found.
Jack Welch is undoubtedly one of the single most successful managers ever, and that was most definitely his approach.
Same applies to trading, anybody with an IQ north of his birth date will have to admit that this is not even remotely rocket science, yet all you have to do to find tremendous complexity or obfuscation of simple facts is going through boards or investment conferences for that matter, where a majority will always seek refuge in ever more complicated strategies rather than accept the innate simplicity of trading because they simply do not like losing or accepting volatility.
The $500 Billion Hedge Fund Folly
FORBES
What's so alluring about unregulated investment partnerships? They soak you with high fees and underperform the market.
What do Barbra Streisand, Senator Robert Torricelli and Bianca Jagger have in common? They have all lost money investing in hedge funds.
...Mediocre returns, outrageous fees and a whiff of scandal have not stopped the hedge fund business from enjoying explosive growth in the past decade.
...If you mess up on Wall Street, don't despair. There's room for you in the very forgiving world of hedge funds, where you can get a second chance-witness these financiers.
Michael Berger lost $500 million when Manhattan Investment blew up.
Joseph Jett, disgraced ex-Kidder, Peabody trader, founded Cambridge Matrix.
John Meriwether, Long-Term Capital's bungler, now runs JWM Partners.
...If you want to know what's wrong with the hedge fund concept, spend some time with John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group. He has spent his 50-year career agitating for lower investment costs and so is naturally hostile to things like one-sided incentive fees. But he makes a compelling argument. When you are contemplating the returns you can get from investing this way, he says, don't think about the 456% that this or that manager made in a good year, think about the collective returns from the whole style.
"I think it's inconceivable that you could take $500 billion run by 6,000 different managers and expect these managers to be smarter than the rest of the world," says Bogle. If the overall market is up 10%, he calculates, then hedge fund operators would need a 17% return to beat that--given a 20% carry, a 2% annual fee and taxes. "I don't think that $500 billion has a remote chance of beating 17%," he says.
...Here's the beauty of hedge funds for operators, if not investors: Anybody can open one. "Every Tom, Dick and Harry is putting out a shingle," laments Elizabeth Hilpman, a partner in Barlow Partners, a seven-year-old New York hedge fund of funds. "It's become harder to tell the good managers from the bad."
No kidding. Paul Mozer, whose fast-and-loose bond trading landed him a prison term and almost tanked Salomon Brothers, is said to have started a hedge fund. And John Meriwether, a figure of widespread ignominy after Long-Term Capital imploded, has simply launched a new hedge fund, JWM Partners.
And then there's the silliness. Here's Bogle again: "I looked up one of the guys from the Worldwide Integrated Equity Selection Fund. He has a million dollars in proprietary capital, and he thinks assets are going to double. He says that while other market-neutral managers are making educated guesses, he analyzes the co-integration of stock prices. I don't know what to do about a fund like that.
...The obituary list of hedge funds should give pause to anyone imagining that all these contraptions are bound for glory.
The unhappy truth is most hedge funds can't deliver on their promise of beating the broader stock market over the long haul. During the last five years (through May 2001), the S&P 500 returned an annual 15%. But 9 of the 10 weight-averaged classes of hedge funds monitored by CSFB Tremont delivered sub-S&P returns, after fees. Over ten years hedge funds look even worse. According to MarHedge, another hedge fund tracker, of its 14 major hedge fund categories only 1, called Global Established Markets, beat the S&P's 18% return from 1990 through the middle of last year, and it did so by a rounding margin.
Even worse news: These system-wide figures are too kind to hedge funds. Their managers have no obligation to report returns to the SEC. This business has no Morningstar or Lipper; hedge fund trackers cover just a portion of the business. If hedge fund operators don't feel like answering a survey during a bad quarter, they don't.
In 2000's first quarter 1,068 hedge funds reported to MarHedge, by year-end 160 of them, or 15%, were missing in action. Commodities speculator Victor Niederhoffer reported assets of $125 million to MarHedge in July 1997. In October of that year his position on the Thai baht wiped out his fund. Rather than record a 100% drop in the fund's assets, Niederhoffer simply disappeared from MarHedge's list.
...Still, you're thinking, aren't there geniuses out there who could make money for me? Didn't Warren Buffett have a hedge fund back in the 1960s, before he bought control of Berkshire Hathaway? I just have to find the next Warren Buffett.
Good luck. You and several hundred thousand other investors are looking for a few geniuses camouflaged in a crowd of racetrack touts.
Article is from 2001, but otherwise spot on.
"Analyzes co-integration of stock prices", lol, get my drift ?
Someone who can't speak clear can't think clear, and if you can't can't think clear you shouldn't be surprised at a total lack of performance.
I always run anyway very quickly when people come up explaining that everything they are doing is different from what anybody else is or has been doing, and they proceed to entice me to sit through a presentation lasting at least an hour which I simply do not do.
If you cannot explain what you are doing on one sheet of paper or in a few minutes, you yourself don't understand what you are on about.
Least of all in trading, where there simply are not that many sensible ways to make money.
Ockhams Razor: "All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best."
All other things are very equal in trading, and there are very simple solutions to be found.
Hence, less is more.
QED.
;-)
Be it in trading, be it in business, etc etc.
Undue complexity is little more than an excuse for feeble minds that fail to cut to the chase, that fail to unearth the success relevant factors from amidst all the irrelevant noise, that thoroughly fail to understand that it's pretty much always 20% of input that generates 80% of output, which is really all you need to concentrate on to achieve outstanding success.
Testimony to the less is more concept is usually to be found where outstanding success is to be found.
Jack Welch is undoubtedly one of the single most successful managers ever, and that was most definitely his approach.
Same applies to trading, anybody with an IQ north of his birth date will have to admit that this is not even remotely rocket science, yet all you have to do to find tremendous complexity or obfuscation of simple facts is going through boards or investment conferences for that matter, where a majority will always seek refuge in ever more complicated strategies rather than accept the innate simplicity of trading because they simply do not like losing or accepting volatility.
The $500 Billion Hedge Fund Folly
FORBES
What's so alluring about unregulated investment partnerships? They soak you with high fees and underperform the market.
What do Barbra Streisand, Senator Robert Torricelli and Bianca Jagger have in common? They have all lost money investing in hedge funds.
...Mediocre returns, outrageous fees and a whiff of scandal have not stopped the hedge fund business from enjoying explosive growth in the past decade.
...If you mess up on Wall Street, don't despair. There's room for you in the very forgiving world of hedge funds, where you can get a second chance-witness these financiers.
Michael Berger lost $500 million when Manhattan Investment blew up.
Joseph Jett, disgraced ex-Kidder, Peabody trader, founded Cambridge Matrix.
John Meriwether, Long-Term Capital's bungler, now runs JWM Partners.
...If you want to know what's wrong with the hedge fund concept, spend some time with John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group. He has spent his 50-year career agitating for lower investment costs and so is naturally hostile to things like one-sided incentive fees. But he makes a compelling argument. When you are contemplating the returns you can get from investing this way, he says, don't think about the 456% that this or that manager made in a good year, think about the collective returns from the whole style.
"I think it's inconceivable that you could take $500 billion run by 6,000 different managers and expect these managers to be smarter than the rest of the world," says Bogle. If the overall market is up 10%, he calculates, then hedge fund operators would need a 17% return to beat that--given a 20% carry, a 2% annual fee and taxes. "I don't think that $500 billion has a remote chance of beating 17%," he says.
...Here's the beauty of hedge funds for operators, if not investors: Anybody can open one. "Every Tom, Dick and Harry is putting out a shingle," laments Elizabeth Hilpman, a partner in Barlow Partners, a seven-year-old New York hedge fund of funds. "It's become harder to tell the good managers from the bad."
No kidding. Paul Mozer, whose fast-and-loose bond trading landed him a prison term and almost tanked Salomon Brothers, is said to have started a hedge fund. And John Meriwether, a figure of widespread ignominy after Long-Term Capital imploded, has simply launched a new hedge fund, JWM Partners.
And then there's the silliness. Here's Bogle again: "I looked up one of the guys from the Worldwide Integrated Equity Selection Fund. He has a million dollars in proprietary capital, and he thinks assets are going to double. He says that while other market-neutral managers are making educated guesses, he analyzes the co-integration of stock prices. I don't know what to do about a fund like that.
...The obituary list of hedge funds should give pause to anyone imagining that all these contraptions are bound for glory.
The unhappy truth is most hedge funds can't deliver on their promise of beating the broader stock market over the long haul. During the last five years (through May 2001), the S&P 500 returned an annual 15%. But 9 of the 10 weight-averaged classes of hedge funds monitored by CSFB Tremont delivered sub-S&P returns, after fees. Over ten years hedge funds look even worse. According to MarHedge, another hedge fund tracker, of its 14 major hedge fund categories only 1, called Global Established Markets, beat the S&P's 18% return from 1990 through the middle of last year, and it did so by a rounding margin.
Even worse news: These system-wide figures are too kind to hedge funds. Their managers have no obligation to report returns to the SEC. This business has no Morningstar or Lipper; hedge fund trackers cover just a portion of the business. If hedge fund operators don't feel like answering a survey during a bad quarter, they don't.
In 2000's first quarter 1,068 hedge funds reported to MarHedge, by year-end 160 of them, or 15%, were missing in action. Commodities speculator Victor Niederhoffer reported assets of $125 million to MarHedge in July 1997. In October of that year his position on the Thai baht wiped out his fund. Rather than record a 100% drop in the fund's assets, Niederhoffer simply disappeared from MarHedge's list.
...Still, you're thinking, aren't there geniuses out there who could make money for me? Didn't Warren Buffett have a hedge fund back in the 1960s, before he bought control of Berkshire Hathaway? I just have to find the next Warren Buffett.
Good luck. You and several hundred thousand other investors are looking for a few geniuses camouflaged in a crowd of racetrack touts.
Article is from 2001, but otherwise spot on.
"Analyzes co-integration of stock prices", lol, get my drift ?
Someone who can't speak clear can't think clear, and if you can't can't think clear you shouldn't be surprised at a total lack of performance.
I always run anyway very quickly when people come up explaining that everything they are doing is different from what anybody else is or has been doing, and they proceed to entice me to sit through a presentation lasting at least an hour which I simply do not do.
If you cannot explain what you are doing on one sheet of paper or in a few minutes, you yourself don't understand what you are on about.
Least of all in trading, where there simply are not that many sensible ways to make money.
Ockhams Razor: "All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best."
All other things are very equal in trading, and there are very simple solutions to be found.
Hence, less is more.
QED.
;-)
