The avalanche of press this year about the death of buy and hold investing has surprised even me, and I have been forecasting this change in our industry for just about a decade. Now that financial advisors and professional pension and endowment investors are paying attention, I am watching to see how the industry is going to address this problem. You have an industry that is populated by professionals who have passionately followed the buy and hold dictums of strategic asset allocation for their entire careers, and all of the sudden they need to come up with “the quick fix.” What should they do as pragmatic business people when the status quo about the “right” way to invest has changed, virtually overnight?
When it comes to personal financial advisors, those Certified Financial Planners (CFP®) who are my peers in providing “sophisticated” asset management for affluent investors, I have long predicted that the solution will appear in the form of some kind of technical analysis-driven process. Clearly the least expensive method for active management, in terms of both time and treasure, is to focus on technical trading methods. I can see new institutional level software (i.e., expensive) that will cater to big firms looking to add a “tactical overlay” to their current buy and hold, strategic asset allocation portfolios. In the world of pensions and endowments, my partner, John Hill, recently told me that the consultants to a non-profit board that he sits on recently offered exactly that. The endowment investment committee could remain strategic (buy and hold), or they could purchase the new razzle-dazzle tactical overlay that would change the asset allocation based on their new, proprietary, techno-sizzle methodology. If professional money managers are afraid that their clients are going to demand active management, I think the tactical overlay will be an easy sale.
Of course, the technical solution will not require that the consultant firms that have advised their clients to buy and hold for decades have an actual track record in active management. Or, for RIA’s (Registered Investment Advisors) catering to affluent clients, their new tactical overlay will not require them to actually learn about market fundamentals, do the research, invest in knowledge and people, or be responsible for the asset allocation changes that are integral to active management. They will instantly have a credible, saleable, technologically marvelous, scientific, and relatively cheap, solution to their problem. Since we (Pinnacle Advisory Group, Inc.) are still slogging along reading the research and actually doing the work, a theme that is mentioned several times in my book, I wonder if we somehow got it wrong?
