Finance: Too Much Product
"Tony Dye was one of Britain's best known fund managers, becoming a household name in the late 1990s due to his controversial opinions about the outlook for global stock markets. At a time when markets were soaring, Dye insisted they were overvalued and on the verge of a crash – a view which put him at odds with most other investors at the time and earned him the nickname'Dr Doom'."As early as 1995, as the FTSE 100 was approaching 4,000 points, Dye began to make the case that markets were too expensive. At the time, he was the chief investment officer for Phillips & Drew one of Britain's biggest asset management firms, and by 1996 he had begun to move large sums of clients' money out of equities and into cash."In the years that followed, however, stock markets continued to soar, driven by the technology boom. But Dye stuck to his guns, avoiding the high-growth, high-risk internet stocks, maintaining large positions in cash, and consequently ensuring that Phillips & Drew's funds significantly underperformed their rivals. By 1999, the firm was ranked 66th out of 67 for performance amongst Britain's institutional fund managers, and was haemorrhaging clients – and in February the following year, just weeks after the FTSE had broken through 7,000 points for the first time, Dye was sacked."Days later, his prophesy finally came true. Markets collapsed, and settled into a three year slump, which saw more than 50 per cent wiped off the value of global stock markets."
"The short-term horizon is basically introduced by the intermediary sector. Pension trustees [for example] are told they should keep reviewing managers, while retail investors get constant invitations to trade from independent financial advisers [for example] and the platforms set up to enable them to do so."
"How easy would Warren Buffett find it to set up now?"
"If cheaper currency is the source of wealth, where has Bangladesh gone wrong? If cheaper money means economic prosperity, why not just print as much as we can and give it out to everyone?"We have become fools. The customers know nothing and the advisers know even less. And then we have the idiot economists – the neo-classical Keynesian variety with solutions to problems they did not even anticipate; solutions that have, in fact, been long discredited. And so we lurch from crisis to crisis, eating our meagre capital in the hopes of becoming rich in money. It is a pity."
"I would rather lose half of my shareholders than half of my shareholders' money."