Scott Sheppard
April 18, 2022
Tactical Growth Mandate - Weekly Briefing
Trusting everyone’s easter egg hunt was successful! Mine began at 6:10am when Eric woke, then proceed to ensure that I was also wide awake. Despite my best efforts, he couldn’t get back to sleep after a full 17 seconds of trying. After the quick hunt concluded, I jumped back in bed and we left Eric on the couch to watch some TV and play his new Nintendo game. We got up a while later to get him breakfast. Turns out that he had already gotten himself some eggs… they were Cadbury mini-eggs, but at least he ate.
While we’re on the topic of eggs, are you keeping all of yours in the same basket? That most basic lesson of investing has been suggested to us all at some point, but the interpretation has been wide. Some believe it means splitting investments among multiple stocks, multiple asset classes, or multiple geographies.
The truth is that having too many stocks in one’s account or mutual funds has been mathematically proven to ensure that over-diversification will lead to the same or very similar returns of the market indexes. Harry Markowitz, the Nobel prize winner for Economics, pioneered this concept known as Modern Portfolio Theory. It’s the foundation of how institutions manage portfolios and why the returns of the major competitors look identical (see below).
Tactical Growth is about being different from the crowd and achieving outperformance. It’s about moving away from many of the passive investment beliefs and exploiting their inefficiencies. It’s about holding a concentrated basket of the best eggs and keeping a close eye on that basket.