The longer I keep putting off writing this, harder it gets. Part of the reason for that is that I originally set out to write this in the format that I, as a reader, would have found most useful. Aka the kind of journal that’s pretty much chronologically complete and doesn’t have huge gaps in the evolution of thought. That’s not gonna happen now
because I lack the time to write down all that happened.
(I actually started writing updates several times, but never had the time to finish any. Maybe I’ll post some of that later, even though it’s now almost completely out of date.)
Also, general note to self: a quick answer, or even a “I’ll get back at you later”, may be very uncomfortable to write, but it’s still better than months of complete radio silence. Somehow, I keep doing that. When I crossed off my longest overdue message off my to-do-list yesterday, the app said it was due 348 days ago. I think my absolute record was two years. I definitely need to get this under control before I even think about becoming self-employed or anything of the sort.
So, the quick update:
When I wrote here the last time, that was still during deployment, wasn’t it? Well, I got to leave that a bit early, due to one death and one grave illness in my family. Worst Christmas Holiday ever, but, as the saying goes, this too passed. (Pun a little bit intended.) Apparently having your loved ones die while you’re away is a fairly common occurrence in the Navy (or, more generally, people with frequent long absences), just not one that’s often talked about. I kinda could have anticipated this but didn’t. Who does?
The transfer request is still stuck in bureaucratic hell. Partial cause of the delay is that I had to withdraw the original version of it, since it included the request (this is normal for a transfer, due to re-training etc) that my enlistment time be extended to four years total. The problem? The German Navy very recently decided to abolish all enlistment times under eight years, including for the rank and file. I can only conclude from this that the people in charge are hypocrites, since they claim to want to attract especially the young people who are “high-potentials”, but then do stuff like this. I humbly suggest that using any good military in the world as a blueprint (US, UK, I’m looking at you) would be a better idea, but who cares about my suggestion.*
*Depending on how this goes, I might write an open letter to the army magazine, something along the lines of “why I decided not to re-up”. Mostly for my own psychological health, locus of control and all that.
If the request does go through, which I’m no longer counting on, I’ll throw a party and hug everyone I like. Then, after my term ends early next year, I can hopefully serve in the mission my ship is scheduled to go on as a Reservist, since it’s pretty cool. If it doesn’t, I’ll probably apply for a two-year training as a Reservist officer, which would also bring my total enlistment time up to four years.
(It just occurred to me that it might not be clear from text only... my sister once gifted me a t-shirt that says “I like to party and by party I mean read books” when I was 15 or so)
I also enrolled into an undergraduate degree course at Germany’s equivalent of Open University (FernUni Hagen). Apparently I mistranslated the subject of the degree before; in the English-speaking world, it’s known as Cultural Studies. It’s a lot of fun and a good fit with my current web of goals, so I’m continuing it. On the other side... I keep a list of open questions that pop up during my studies, and one of them is “Is the benefit humanity derives from the humanities departments within academia really proportional to the size of the institution?” To illustrate what I mean: my first module is “An introduction to the scientific method and its application in the humanities”, and the author used the phrase “scientific reputation” so many times it actually made me feel sick. Maybe I’m just naive. Another question I wrote down was “He keeps using the word ‘scientific’ but in this context his sentences make more sense for me if I replace the word with ‘academic’.”
I’m no longer really worried about making money, but more about preserving it and putting it to work for me. I just can’t find a way to do that in which I’d have reasonable confidence at the current point in time. See the rest of this post for that.
Future plans revolve pretty much around answering the questions “Why do the things happen which are going on in the world?” (also know as “WTF is going on?”) and “How do I want to act?” The transfer would be immensely helpful with that, as I’d be working in a combat information centre. Afterwards, I can see myself getting an econ undergraduate degree in the mid term future here in Germany (we do not really have America’s tuition cost problem), as it’s a good fit with my current web of goals. (Obviously all plans are subject to revision). Getting a second citizenship might be a good idea, and I’m eligible for the Spanish one through ancestry, so I might move to Spain for a year. Either way, moving abroad for a while is part of the mid-term plan. (Other countries that are on my current short list include North Europe including the British Isles, North America, and the Antipodes. List not definitive.) Given that getting paid for doing research on interesting subjects seems like a dream come true for my personality type, a PhD is also not out of the question. Other options include work in journalism, insurance, government, defence, finance or other fields, due to the question stated above.
There isn’t really much else to say here, so I thought I’d write about a subject I’ve wanted to write about since my first post, but never found the time to do it “properly”. I’m never gonna find that time, so now I’ll do it anyway.
The subject is, of course, investing. I think I might have crossed the top of Mount Stupid a while ago, and now I’m lost deep in the swamps of the Valley of Confusion. To reiterate: if this sounds confused, that’s because that is what I am. So now I’m going to do what I probably should have been doing all along for optimum learning effect, that is, describe the evolution of my thinking on the subject and my current understanding. I’m very well aware that there are no shortcuts to getting out of this valley, but I think writing it all down is a worthwhile exercise for me because it helps to clarify my thoughts and find out what exact directions I need to explore next. So, here goes:
Evolution of Investing Thought
My original plan was to build wealth with an indexing strategy. Very early on when I started to get interested in investing I found the work of Andreas Beck, “Global Portfolio One”. Essentially, it’s 80% equities, 20% cash in normal times. In a medium recession, you go to 10% cash, and in a bad one, 0%. There are specific criteria for what’s what; for example, the 2020 crash would’ve only been medium. The equity position is composed of ~2 index etfs, one being an etf that tracks the MSCI All Countries World Index. It’s supposed to have both emerging market and small cap components, so a total diversification over 7000+ companies.
Andreas Beck offers a fund that follows exactly this strategy, with around 2% TER IIRC, but actually recommends people to not buy into his fund, but DIY the portfolio instead, given that it’s such a simple strategy.
I’m not a fan of doing things like “invest my life savings” without doing extensive research first (apparently way past what most of the personal finance blogosphere and most people I know IRL who have some interest in the subject consider “due diligence”, but I’m not sure what to make of this observation). Therefore, I kept reading. I figured I’d learn this particular subject better if I apply what I learn on a small scale, to bridge the theory/practice gap. So, early last year, I set up a 10€/month savings plan into a MSCI ACWI etf (savings plans don’t have a commission with that broker if the amount is small enough). I invested 100€ into that etf before I lost confidence in the strategy and stopped it. Because I DCA’d right into the covid recovery, it’s now worth 105€ or so. With a net worth of ~27k as of yesterday, that’s an equity position of 0,3%. There’s also a nano-sized crypto position, since I dabbled with alt coin mining on my computer (I don’t pay the electricity bill of the base building) but that experiment is on indefinite hiatus due to concerns over equipment wear. I don’t think I could buy the proverbial ice cream from that position
The overall plan however, of trying to apply what I learn with money I can afford to lose, still seems sensical to me. In particular, I think it might help me get familiar with the emotions involved (behavioural investing). It wasn’t a nice feeling when my first 10€ investment was only worth ~9,80€ at some point
I hadn’t yet learned to reframe it as “buying opportunity” at that point.
The investing book which so far made the most sense to me was Investing: The Last Liberal Art. Probably because it’s so meta. For example, my first reaction to Graham’s discussion to common stock vs. preferred shares was “Wait, what the hell is a preferred share?”. I’ve since changed the order of my reading list around so that economics books are closer to the top, which is probably the way I should have done it to begin with.
Other subjects that have been on my to learn list are different asset classes (particularly commodities and REITs seem interesting, whereas I’m not sure why I should want to be a creditor if a lot of the world is deeply in debt) and their allocation, tax concerns, inflation (I understand that the standard consumer goods basket with which inflation is measured is not the same as my standard shopping list, and also prone to being “redefined” according to political considerations, but I haven’t yet gotten around to calculating what the inflation rate of my personal consumer goods basket is), currency risk, and considerations such as “How is my investing strategy influenced by the country I currently reside in, what should I do if I intend to move in the next 5-6 years, and will probably move countries several times in the next decades?”. I don’t have anything to say about those things except that they’re on that list.
This forum is the most indexing-averse place I know, and I wanted to understand the concerns.
(Content warning: the epistemic status of the following section varies between “uncertain” and “pure conjecture”.)
One argument that seems important to me is that of paradigm change.
OT1H: Investment paradigms change roughly every 10-15 years or so (see also YMOYL’s original recommendation of treasuries) and buying in towards the end is not a good idea. In a zero-sum game, for all winners there are losers, and if a strategy gets too widely adopted, it loses its edge. See also: “How to beat the market” books proposing strategies that worked just fine in the past, but stop working after publication (because the book only got published once that was more profitable than the strategy itself).
OTOH: A central tenet of indexing philosophy is that the zero-sum game assumption is false. It presumes instead that the capital markets are positive-sum games. I’m not really sure about any part of this argumentation, but historically this seems to have been true in recent centuries due to innovation and population growth, but false for e.g. the Dark Ages. So the question to debate at this point would be: “How true is this assumption going to be in the twenty-first century?”. Debating this goes too far for just the pro and con of indexing, so but I return to it farther down. Since indexing is an optimistic philosophy, we’ll assume it’s true for the purpose of this argumentation. In that case, the question is if the paradigm change argument really applies. If your returns approximate the average and you’re content with this rising average, you don’t really need to worry about winning and losing strategies. Right?
Rebuttal:
Let’s leave aside the question of winning and losing strategies for active investing, since they’re again missing the point. The question is: Can index investing, if it’s too widely adopted, lead to systemic effects that make indexing as a strategy unprofitable for a retail investor at this moment in time?
(Warning: Digression)
I want to say here “where the market goes is determined by the ratio of sellers vs buyers times the amount they each sell or buy” because that’s the level at which I understand it, but I’m not sure if it’s true or sufficiently accurate for this discussion. I’ve read something about short term movements being determined by the futures market and long term by the underlying, but that doesn’t explain what moves the futures market and I don’t understand this. So, for the purpose of the discussion: if number of buyers x amount they buy on average > number of sellers x amount they sell on average, then the market goes up, if it’s <, it goes down. So, the profitability of buying into the index is decided by how many people participate in the capital market and by the amount with which they participate. If
1) the boomers sell off their 401k’s to fund their retirement, that creates downward pressure,
2) a bunch of people in industrialising countries have access to global financial markets for the first time, and participate, that creates upward pressure,
3) investing becomes more popular because everyone’s favourite guru and their mom tells them “it’s the way to build wealth if you stick with it long enough”, that creates upward pressure,
4) the government continues QE, which, instead of ending up in the real economy, mostly gets fed into the capital markets, that creates upward pressure,
5) investing becomes much less popular because a bunch of influencers convince enough people that investing is evil/the capital markets as an institution do not serve humanity (Is it a wise allocation of resources to have ~150 000 fonds and millions of financial products essentially betting on the price development of ~8000 companies? That and similar arguments are how I could in theory see this viewpoint gaining acceptance) and people move into gold/crypto/post stamps/carbon emission certificates/ whatever instead, that creates downwards pressure,
6) (hyper)inflation makes people want to avoid having cash lying around, that creates upward pressure,
7) distrust towards fiat currencies & central banks / fear of capital controls etc makes people not want to have fiat money lying around (this is similar to the point about inflation, but not the same), that creates upward pressure,
8) a real-world recession, where leveraged people get margin called, people who got laid off sell their investments while they’re unemployed, et cetera, that creates downward pressure,
9) a gazillion of other points that I cannot think of right now also move the markets
then the sum of all that determines the profitability of index investing in the years to come. If my logic is sound, which is a huge if in my mind, then I’d say that, while I cannot predict the future, just buying into the index might not be a particularly good bet. (Otherwise I don’t know.)
None of this answers the question about systemic effects, sorry. That somehow got off track.
Systemic effects would be:
1) Everything becoming more correlated, because instead of individual securities people just buy or sell indexes (I think this holds true across asset classes, so strategies like the Permanent Portfolio might also be due for revision),
2) companies getting bigger because they’re big as the index etfs grow, since that’s the reason they had a had a big place in the index to begin with, but with the issue that some companies with a gigantic market capitalisation might also be pretty illiquid, so there aren’t that many shares available for the index fund to absorb, bidding the few remaining shares even further up, thus exacerbating this effect. Because of the issues with large scale trading of highly illiquid companies, most indices became float-adjusted around the early 2000’s, meaning that the company’s representation within the index is not proportional to its market capitalisation but to its free float. People seem to think this better reflects the markets and it apparently brought down expenses for index fund providers, but I’m left wondering why a more liquid company is assumed to also be the better investment. Someone probably checked this somewhere. If an individual investor wanted to create a DIY index fund that tracks a version of whichever index they want to track which is not float-adjusted, I suspect that this is theoretically possible but probably also a gigantic hassle in practice. Not sure what to make of this.
3) index providing companies getting a huge amount of power (roughly proportional to the popularity of their index), who knows what kind of effect that will have?
4) maybe also bizarre effects during extreme market situations? I really don’t understand this very well, but I’ll try to describe how it looks like to me. Not sure how accurate the following is (probably very little, I have not yet looked very deeply into the fine print even though I should), but let’s use it as basis for the discussion, because it’s the farthest I’ve come so far.
“When a retail investor buys a share of a fund, they have a long position on that fund. They also have the right to redeem it, that means they can sell it back to the issuer at any time at market price (?). (Since the fund is exchange-traded, they can also sell their fund share to another investor or buy a share from someone else, but this doesn’t negate the right to redeem the share for cash with the fund company (?).) This means the company has a short position on the share of their own fund: They sold it for price x. If they buy it back for less than x, they make money, if they buy it back for more than x, they lose money. Now our retail investor naturally is naturally interested in avoiding to redeem their share for less than what they paid for it, but they will do it if they think it’ll only keep going down or they want to finance a new McMansion or whatever. Therefore, the fund company needs some kind of hedge against the share of their fund going up, which they have in the form of their long position on the underlying. (Is it correct that this implies that they make money from their expense ratio, not fund performance (insofar they aren’t invested in their own fund), and the benefit they gain from good performance is that it attracts investors, enlarging the fund, so that they make more money through the expense ratio?) If this fund is an index fund, the long position they have is on the securities that make up the index. Now I’m not sure if this is true for index funds or for all funds, but there’s a clause which says that some investors, not retail, can redeem their shares not for cash but in kind, aka exchange it for the underlying (block redemption). This is why the price of the fund matches that of the underlying. If they diverge, it opens up opportunities for (algorithmic) arbitrage. Arbitrageurs take advantage of this, and therefore make the price of a fund share match that of the underlying given normal market conditions.”
Now the question is: can they keep doing it during abnormal market conditions? I don’t know enough to discuss this point any further, but it seems like this is kinda important for understanding what’s actually going on.
Another point concerning extreme market conditions is the liquidity issue. The fund companies keep a cash position for redemptions (doesn’t this decrease fund performance in boom times, and improve it in market drops, or is it somehow not counted?), but if there are too many redemptions, they have to sell the underlying. But what if there aren’t enough buyers? The sell-off would keep driving down the price, so the entire fund might not liquidate at the price at which the investors wanted to redeem. Where does the money for the investors then come from? Do they become the bag holders because the tracking error (?) suddenly became very large, to their disadvantage? Their long position is on the fund share, not on the underlying, so the tracking error is how their investment performed worse than the underlying securities of the index. How likely is all this to pose an issue? Due to the size of these funds, could the latter scenario be so improbable that it’s basically impossible? I don’t know what kinds of risk a retail index investor is actually exposed to because of this.
I don’t like buying things I do not understand, just like I don’t like using appliances I don’t understand, so the above means I probably won’t be indexing until I’ve got a better idea of what that actually does. Depending on how the above gets resolved for me, I’m not averse to using it as a tool within my portfolio. Since I’ve started learning about investing, I’ve realised that for my everyday life it makes more sense to get a cash flow from my investments, for which the current market quotation is pretty much irrelevant as long as the cash flow remains secure. But there are a lot of cool, non-consumerist things that can be done with money, and I’m so young that compounding has a long time to do its work, so it seems sensible to set aside a portfolio for appreciation, to be used at a future date for a yet undefined purpose. (It would also function as a fall-back if too many income streams dry up simultaneously and needs cannot be met through non-monetary means.) Again the results of the investigation pending, I think a strategy like the one described at the very beginning of this section could be a tool I might use for that. It has the advantage of being rather hands-off, unlike, for example, the small cap investing that guy from adventures in capitalism does. But, if I had to come up with a bottom line for all of the above, I think that “the paradigm change argument seems plausible and now is probably not a good time to start index investing” would come pretty close. (And I didn’t even mention current valuations and CAPE. Oops.)
As for my current investing ideas, I’ve been looking for investments that that provide reasonable cash flow. I just can’t find anything that has a yield that’s not in the ballpark of 1%, has low levels of debt (debt is a problem if interest rates rise, because debt service becomes more expensive, right?) and just seems like an overall sane choice. I’m also currently privileging my education in fundamental aspects over the search for investment opportunities. If we have another crash, I’m sure I’ll find something to buy that’s overvalued now but will be an okay deal then, so until then I’ll just keep sitting on my cash pile like Dagobert Duck.
Closing words:
I wanted to write something about the assumptions of innovation and population growth in the twenty-first century. Since this has already exploded in size, I’ll keep it brief. I can image several future scenarios very vividly, from “current trends regarding poverty, world hunger etc getting better continue, we avoid dystopia, nuclear fusion and resources from asteroids and other planets turn Star Trek into a reality” to “long and more or less turbulent descent of civilisation reminiscent of the fall of the Roman Empire, only on a global scale”. Heck, I can even imagine an abrupt complete collapse of civilisation. The issue is that my imagination does not provide me with a probability estimate, and I do not trust my intuition on this issue. So, for me this is all simply tagged as “more research needed”.
Thank you! You're right, I can definitely recommend this exercise. Not just for clarification of thought but also because it's much easier to structure your study plan afterwards. I'm curious to see what you come up with when you do it 
