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One of the most important developments in the financial world in recent years has been the growth of evidence-based investing. But what exactly is it? In the first of a new series of exclusive articles for Justwealth, the UK based author and journalist Robin Powell explains why founding your investment strategy on four basic principles can dramatically improve your chances of achieving your long-term goals.
By Robin Powell, The Evidence-Based Investor
Special to Financial Independence Hub
It takes between seven and nine years to train to be a doctor in Canada. For surgeons it takes as many as 14. Even then, both doctors and surgeons are required to engage in continuous learning throughout their careers.
Becoming a financial adviser, investment consultant or money manager is considerably less onerous. What’s more, unless you deliberately set out to defraud your clients, you’re unlikely to be stripped of your right to operate.
Of course, there are still examples of poor medical practice. It was only as recently as the early 1990s that a group of epidemiologists at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, first coined the phrase evidence-based medicine. Sadly, though, professional malpractice in the investing industry is far more common, and there are many who have worked in it for decades and yet act as if they have little or no grasp of the evidence on how investing works.
A glaring illustration of this is a study published in May 2018 called The Misguided Belief of Financial Advisers. The researchers analyzed the returns achieved by around 4,400 advisers across Canada: both for their clients and for themselves. They found that the advisers made the same mistakes investing their own money as they did when investing their clients’ money.
For example, they traded too frequently, chased returns, preferred expensive, actively managed funds, and weren’t sufficiently diversified. All of those things have been shown, time and again, to lead to lower returns. On average, the clients of the advisers analyzed underperformed the market by around three per cent a year: a huge margin.
What is evidence-based investing?
In recent years, we’ve seen the development of what’s called evidence-based investing (EBI). Like evidence-based medicine, it entails the ongoing critical appraisal of evidence, rather than relying on traditional practices or expert opinions.
So what sort of evidence are we talking about? Essentially there are four main elements to the evidence that underpins EBI.
First, the evidence is based on research that is genuinely independent; in other words, the research wasn’t paid for or subsidized by organizations with a vested interest in the outcome.
Secondly, it’s peer-reviewed. This means that the findings are published in a peer-reviewed journal which is closely examined by experts on the subject.
Thirdly, the evidence is time-tested. Investment strategies often succeed over short time periods, but fail over longer ones. Investors should disregard any evidence that hasn’t stood the test of time.
Finally, the evidence results from rigorous data analysis. As everyone knows, data can be very misleading if it hasn’t been properly analysed.
The good news is that, even when all four of these filters are strictly applied, there is still plenty of evidence to inform our investment decisions. Since the 1950s, finance departments at universities across the globe have produced many thousands of relevant studies.
What does the evidence tell us?
What, then, are the main lessons from academic research on investing? This is a wide-ranging subject, and one we’ll look at in more detail in future articles, but there are four main takeaways.
Markets are broadly efficient
Because markets are competitive and prices reflect all knowable information, it’s very hard to identify stocks, bonds or entire asset classes which are either undervalued or overvalued at any one time. No, prices aren’t perfect, but they’re the most reliable guide we have as to how much a security is worth.
Diversification is an investor’s friend
It’s vital for investors to diversify across different asset classes, economic sectors and regions of the world. As well as reducing your risk, diversification can also improve your returns in the long run, and it is rightly referred to as “the only free lunch in investing.”
Costs make a big difference
The investing industry and the media tend to focus on investment performance. But while performance comes and goes, fees and charges never falter.
Keeping your costs down will improve your net returns, and it’s one of the few things that investors actually have control over.
Discipline and a long-term perspective are critical
Investors are prone to a wide range of behavioural biases which have a negative impact on their decision making. They also tend to act on their emotions. Both are very unhelpful. The best returns are achieved by disciplined investors who maintain a long-term focus.
Why doesn’t everyone invest this way?
If you base your strategy on these four lessons, you will notice a significant, and positive, difference over time. Why, then, don’t more people invest in an evidence-based way?
Again, this is a big and complex subject, but it’s basically down to two things.
The first factor is human nature. As I’ve already explained, rational investors diversify and keep their costs low, and the simplest way to do it is to invest in a passively managed fund, or a portfolio of passive funds.
But most investors aren’t rational. They assume they can outperform through stock selection or market timing, or else identify a fund manager with the skill to do it for them. Either way, the odds of success are heavily stacked against them.
The second reason why there aren’t more people just buying and holding passive funds is that the industry — chiefly banks, fund managers and brokers — invest heavily in PR and advertising in order to dissuade us. If only you invest in this or that, they tell us, you could be rich. We naturally want to believe them, and, in theory, they may just be right. But the overwhelming likelihood is that you’re better off ignoring them.
Active investing — the game the industry wants us to play — is a classic example of the triumph of hope over experience, the reassuring lie over the inconvenient truth.
So, who are you going to believe? The Bay Street marketing machine? Or seven decades of academic research on how to invest?
Choose wisely. Your long-term financial security could depend on it.
Robin Powell is an award-winning journalist and campaigner for positive change in global investing, advocating better investor education and greater transparency.
For most of his career in mainstream journalism, Robin worked in broadcast news and current affairs. For 14 years he was a news reporter and documentary maker for ITV Central and network ITV News and ITV Sport. He went freelance in 2005, and spent seven years working mainly for Sky News and for The Politics Show on BBC1.
Robin is a member of the Chartered Institute of Journalists and was a Visiting Media Fellow at Duke University in North Carolina.
As well as The Evidence-Based Investor, he edits Adviser 2.0, a blog which explores the changes taking place within the financial advice profession. He is the writer and presenter of many highly-acclaimed online documentaries about investing, among others the titles Index Funds: The 12-Step Recovery Program for Active Investors, and Investing: The Evidence.
Robin is Founder and Executive Director of Ember Regis Group and its subsidiaries Regis Media, a niche provider of content marketing for financial advice firms and wealth managers with an evidence-based investment philosophy, as well as Ember Television, which produces and distributes broadcast-quality video content. Ember specialises in sharing new and disruptive ideas and in helping clients to become thought leaders in their field.
