Active management is a zero-sum game before cost, and the winners have to win at the expense of the losers.
I’d compare stock pickers to astrologers but I don’t want to bad mouth astrologers.
I take the market-efficiency hypothesis to be the simple statement that security prices fully reflect all available information.
In an efficient market at any point in time the actual price of a security will be a good estimate of its intrinsic value.
I can’t figure out why anyone invests in active management, so asking me about hedge funds is just an extreme version of the same question. Since I think everything is appropriately priced, my advice would be to avoid high fees. So you can forget about hedge funds.
The efficient market theory is one of the better models in the sense that it can be taken as true for every purpose I can think of. For investment purposes, there are very few investors that shouldn’t behave as if markets are totally efficient.
After taking risk into account, do more managers than you’d see by chance outperform with persistence? Virtually every economist who studied this question answers with a resounding ‘no.’
I don’t think the Federal Reserve has any role in how high rates are right now. I don’t understand why everyone is paying attention to this tapering. The Fed is using one kind of bond to buy another kind of bond. What’s the big deal, and why is anyone taking the Fed seriously?
An investor doesn’t have a prayer of picking a manager that can deliver true alpha.