Sixty Shades of Sunday: Investment Thoughts

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The key conclusion of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis - the dominant orthodoxy in finance over the past 60 years - is that trying to beat financial markets is a fool's errand. Market prices jiggle about randomly, discounting all new information in an all but instantaneous fashion, thereby rendering it impossible to beat the market. In the face of this conclusion, the rational investor should eschew any attempt to try and beat the market and should gain their exposure via relatively low-cost passive vehicles. Nonetheless, there are inefficiencies in the behaviour of market economies and the financial markets embedded within them, which the active investor with the right approach has an attractive probability of exploiting. Of course that is not to say that the market is easy to beat, or in the saltier words of Charlie Munger, the long-time business partner of Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway: "It's not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid". John Looby - a portfolio manager on the global equity team at Kleinwort Benson Investors in Dublin and a board member of the Value Investment Institute - has spent the past 25 years trying not to be stupid. More recently, he has shared thoughts on this goal in regular newspaper opinion pieces. With the challenge of beating the market as daunting as ever, it is timely to bring these pieces together in a new collection to help you navigate your own investment journey.