Investment philosophy is a set of guiding principles that instruct and shape an individual's investment decision-making process. In the vast world of stock market, choosing the “best” investment philosophy is often been said as one of the biggest challenge to the investor as there are many that have been developed over the decades. Thus common people or so called investor tends to follow the investment philosophy that established by the reputably successful investor while picking the favourable stock. For instance, Value Investing by Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett as well as Theory of Reflexivity by George Soros.
Benjamin Graham, the Father of Value Investing who introduced the ideas of Value Investing through his first publication of Security Analysis in year 1934. He believed that the market is over reacted to good or bad news and the price would be highly fluctuated. Thus the basic idea of Value Investing is to search for security which the price traded under its
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Buffett continues to operate under Graham’s assumption that there is a distinction between price and value, while at the same time, he consider stocks as fractional ownership interests in underlying businesses and the value in Buffett’s eye would include the potential value of the company. (Robert F. Bierig, 2000)
George Soros was famously known as the "the man who broke the Bank of England". The philosophy behind his trading strategy was the Theory of Reflexivity that contrasts with the traditional ideas that stated financial markets tend towards equilibrium. Soros believed that the market fundamentals are directly influenced by market participants themselves, and their irrational behavior would lead to boom or bust that creates the investment opportunities. (G.Soros,
In Thomas Sowell’s essay Needs, he reflects on the fact that Americans routinely interchange the word “needs” with what Sowell believes is in reality the individual’s “wants”. Sowell creates unity with his audience but loses the unity when discussing entitlements and contradicting himself. He then digresses by shifting his tone and turning his essay into a political movement.
Sberna, Robert. House of Horrors: The Shocking True Story of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Strangler. Kent, Ohio: Black Squirrel Books, 2012. Print.
As he recounts in "Doing What Matters," Mr. Kilts was fortunate to have a wise board that included Warren Buffett and Henry Kravis. Mr. Kilts says that in Mr. Buffett's view, unrealistic earnings estimates were the problem. Mr. Buffett made his opinion known "both at Gillette board meetings and in public comments," Mr. Kilts writes, quoting him saying: "For a major corporation to predict that its per share earnings will grow over the long term at, say, 15 percent annually, is to court trouble." And: "Managers that always promise to 'make the numbers' will at some point be tempted to 'make up' the numbers.
"Our Core Principles - Edward Jones: Making Sense of Investing." Edward Jones. Web. 12 Apr.
Despite serving the same God and reading the same Bible and sharing the same moral values, Christians routinely disagree over how to respond to public policy issues. Why is this so?
Is The Tyranny Of Shareholder Value Finally Ending? N.p., n.d. Web. The Web.
Warren Buffet once said, “Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago” (Buffett, Cunningham 51). During the deepest and longest-lasting economic downturn in history, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors, the Great Depression, Warren Buffet was buying and selling his first stocks. Amid the difficult times, Warren Buffett became one of the greatest investors ever and is regularly ranked among the wealthiest people in the world with a net-worth of 66.7 billion dollars (“History”).
Investment theory is based upon some simple concepts. Investors should want to maximize their return while minimizing their risk at the same time. In order to accomplish this goal investors should diversify their portfolios based upon expected returns and standard deviations of individual securities. Investment theory assumes that investors are risk averse, which means that they will choose a portfolio with a smaller standard deviation. (Alexander, Sharpe, and Bailey, 1998). It is also assumed that wealth has marginal utility, which basically means that a dollar potentially lost has more perceived value than a dollar potentially gained. An indifference curve is a term that represents a combination of risk and expected return that has an equal amount of utility to an investor. A two dimensional figure that provides us with return measurements on the vertical axis and risk measurements (std. deviation) on the horizontal axis will show indifference curves starting at a point and moving higher up the vertical axis the further along the horizontal axis it moves. Therefore a risk averse investor will choose an indifference curve that lies the furthest to the northwest because this would r...
According to Investopedia (Asset Allocation Definition, 2013), asset allocation is an investment strategy that aims to balance risk and reward by distributing a portfolio’s assets according to an individual’s goals, risk tolerance and investment horizon. There are three main asset classes: equities, fixed-income, cash and cash equivalents; but they all have different levels of risk and return. A prudent investor should be careful in allocating each asset class to his portfolio. Proper asset allocation is a highly debatable subject and is not designed equally for everybody, but is rather based on the desires and needs of the individual investor. This paper discusses the importance of asset allocation, the differences and the proper diversification within the portfolio.
One reason is that many successful investment ventures itself is the outcome of these ‘irrationality’. Risk-taking, which is inevitable in investment, may contribute to the investors’ better performance than others, while with the assistance of proper training, assessment accuracy can be increased(Palich and Ray Bagby, 1995). Also, if without precedent, most of the newly-invented value-maximising approaches or strategy of investment ought to be considered as crude and unthoughtful, but in reality, they are regarded as innovation(Busenitz and Barney, 1997). Furthermore, there are evidence shows that instead of being the hindrance of correct investment decision-making, those biases and heuristics are backed up by probabilistic information. Accurate statistical probability can be evaluated by our inductive reasoning mechanism with a relatively high possibility(Cosmides and Tooby,
There is a sense of complexity today that has led many to believe the individual investor has little chance of competing with professional brokers and investment firms. However, Malkiel states this is a major misconception as he explains in his book “A Random Walk Down Wall Street”. What does a random walk mean? The random walk means in terms of the stock market that, “short term changes in stock prices cannot be predicted”. So how does a rational investor determine which stocks to purchase to maximize returns? Chapter 1 begins by defining and determining the difference in investing and speculating. Investing defined by Malkiel is the method of “purchasing assets to gain profit in the form of reasonably predictable income or appreciation over the long term”. Speculating in a sense is predicting, but without sufficient data to support any kind of conclusion. What is investing? Investing in its simplest form is the expectation to receive greater value in the future than you have today by saving income rather than spending. For example a savings account will earn a particular interest rate as will a corporate bond. Investment returns therefore depend on the allocation of funds and future events. Traditionally there have been two approaches used by the investment community to determine asset valuation: “the firm-foundation theory” and the “castle in the air theory”. The firm foundation theory argues that each investment instrument has something called intrinsic value, which can be determined analyzing securities present conditions and future growth. The basis of this theory is to buy securities when they are temporarily undervalued and sell them when they are temporarily overvalued in comparison to there intrinsic value One of the main variables used in this theory is dividend income. A stocks intrinsic value is said to be “equal to the present value of all its future dividends”. This is done using a method called discounting. Another variable to consider is the growth rate of the dividends. The greater the growth rate the more valuable the stock. However it is difficult to determine how long growth rates will last. Other factors are risk and interest rates, which will be discussed later. Warren Buffet, the great investor of our time, used this technique in making his fortune.
I became an enthusiast of finance ever since I was at high school. At the political economy class, my teacher asked us: if you have a million RMB, how would you use it? She then introduced us the concept of investment, and I was intrigued specifically by the stock. For the latter two years of my high school, I have been reading books and articles regarding the stock market in the U.S. and in China. As one of the outstanding students ranked top 1% in College Entrance Exam in Hainan Province, China, I was accepted by the City University of Hong Kong with a full scholarship. With the strong interest in finance, I chose quantitative finance and risk management as my major.
Efficient market hypothesis was developed by professor Eugene Fama at the University of Chicago Booth School Of Business as an academic concept of study through his published Ph.D. thesis in the early 1960s . Fama proposed two crucial concepts that have defined the conversation on efficient markets in his thesis. The efficient market hypothesis was the prominent theory in the 1960s, Fama published dissertation arguing for the random walk hypothesis to support his efficient market theory. “Fama demonstrated that the notion of market efficiency ...
Accounting profit can serve as an alternative to intrinsic value. But Buffett states that “...we do not measure the economic significance or performance of Berkshire by its size; we measure by per-share progress.” Accounting reality was conservative, backward looking, and governed by GAAP (measures in terms of net profit), therefore Buffett rejects this alternative. According to the world’s most famous investor, investment decisions should be based on economic reality, not on accounting
This paper will define and discuss five financial theories and how they impact business decisions made by financial managers. The theories will be the Modern Portfolio Theory, Tobin Separation Theorem, Equilibrium Theory, Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT), and the Efficient Markets Hypothesis.