Novel Investor

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In a fascinating paper published in 1989, Benjamin Friedman and David Laibson hypothesize that all investors function with two models in mind. The first model approximates the efficient market notion that prices are so close to true value that a movement up is as likely as a movement down and that those movements will be lognormally distributed. The second model is that all hell could break loose at any moment. Many years ago, an older partner taught me to distinguish between outcomes that are unlikely and outcomes that are catastrophic. The latter are to be avoided even if the odds on them are tiny. Rational investors respond to this type of problem by operating with anchors to windward. They diversify and avoid total commitment to any one bet. But the fear we all share — that what looks like a market today just might not be there for us tomorrow — makes today’s market less than perfect and less than totally liquid. — Peter Bernstein
It was the publication of E.L. Smith’s little book entitled, Common Stocks as Long-Term Investments. His study showed that, contrary to prevalent beliefs, equities as a whole had proved much better purchases than bonds during the preceding half-century. It is generally held that these findings provided the theoretical and psychological justification for the ensuing bull market of the 1920’s. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), which stood at 90 in mid-1924, advanced to 381 by September 1929, from which high estate it collapsed — as I remember only too well — to an ignominious low of 41 in 1932. On that date the market’s level was the lowest it had registered for more than 30 years. For both General Electric and for the Dow, the high point of 1929 was not to be regained for 25 years. Here was a striking example of the calamity that can ensue when reasoning that is entirely sound when applied to past conditions is blindly followed long after the relevant conditions have changed. What was true of the attractiveness of equity investments when the Dow stood at 90 was doubtful when the level had advanced to 200 and was completely untrue at 300 or higher. — Ben Graham
Those who believe in the permanence of tempestuous seasons will view life as a succession of short runs, where noise dominates signals and the frailty of the basic parameters makes normal too elusive a concept to worry about. These people are pessimists who see nothing in the future but clouds of uncertainty. They make decisions based only on the short distance ahead that they can see. Those who live by regression to the mean spend their time entirely differently. They expect the storm to pass, so that one day the ocean will be flat. On that assumption, they can make the decision to ride out the storm. They are optimists who see the signals by which they will steer their ships toward that happy day when the sun shines through. My own view of the matter is a mixture of these two approaches. Hard experience has taught me that chasing noise leads me to miss the main trend too often. At the same time, having lived through the bond yield/stock yield shift of the late 1950s and the breakthrough of bond yields into the stratosphere beyond 6 percent in the late 1960s — just to mention two such shattering events out of many — I look with suspicion at all main trends and all those means to which variables are supposed to regress. To me, the primary task in investing is to test and then retest some more the parameters and paradigms that appear to govern daily events. Betting against them is dangerous when they look solid, but accepting them without question is the most dangerous step of all. — Peter Bernstein
There are some principles that people need to learn. One is to look widely. Be open-minded about every form of investing in every nation. Don’t let yourself get misled by trying to limit yourself to one area. Our second principle would be diversification. Of course, nobody knows what tomorrow will bring, so it’s not wise to put too many eggs in one basket. Nobody should ever have over half of their total investments in one nation, over half their investments in one industry, and perhaps no more than one fifth of their investments in one corporation, so a worldwide search is better than a local search. Diversification is a safety factor that is essential because we should be humble enough to admit we can be wrong. — John Templeton
That gets me to the point about the relationship between gambling and investing, that is, what you learn from one helps with the other. Gambling games are, for the most part, an area where you can calculate the odds, the probabilities, in detail and get them rather exact. There are some exceptions, like sports betting and so forth, that are more like social or financial markets. But you can actually come into a gambling game with known probabilities and get answers. You have the advantage, like you have in the physical sciences, of so-called repeatable experiments. You can simulate a gambling game a million times if you want because you know the probabilities. It’s much more difficult in the securities markets because we just have one history from which we have to infer what’s going on, and the probabilities that we have are not exact—they’re just estimates. We’re in a world that’s controlled by people, which evolves in complex ways that we don’t fully understand. So you don’t have the same simple rules you have in the physical sciences and in the calculations that are behind gambling games. Nonetheless, the things you learn about gambling games carry over, in large part, to the investment world. — Ed Thorp
My study of history will not lead me to make any definite forecasts involving numbers and dates. That may be a disappointment to some, but it certainly is a great relief to me. The applicability of history almost always appears after the event. When it is all over, we can quote chapter and verse to demonstrate why what happened was bound to happen because it had happened before. This is not really very helpful. The Danish philosopher, Kirkegaard, made the statement that life can only be judged backwards, but it must be lived forward. That certainly is true with respect to our experiences in the stock market. Yet, I think that a knowledge of history — general history, financial history, stock market history — will be found useful for a broad perspective in planning one’s course, even though it may create uncertainty and humility rather than cocksureness with respect to the immediate future. — Benjamin Graham
In those early Wall Street days, it wasn’t too difficult to figure out what I was doing that was wrong. There are two principal mistakes that nearly all amateurs in the stock market make. The first is to have an inexact knowledge of the securities in which one is dealing, to know too little about a company’s management, its earnings, and prospects for future growth. The second mistake is to trade beyond one’s financial resources, to try to run up a fortune on a shoestring. This was my main error at the outset. I had virtually no capital to start with. When I bought stocks I put up so small a margin that a change of a few points could wipe out my equity. What I really was doing, in fact, was little more than betting whether a stock would go up or down. I might be right sometimes, but any sizable fluctuation would wipe me out. Only after I had been wiped out repeatedly did I learn the lesson of not overplaying my hand and of always holding back some part of my capital as a reserve. Had I learned this earlier I would have saved myself many a heartache, and avoided going broke again and again. What I was fighting out inside of myself was the age-old conflict that every ambitious youth experiences — of choosing between a reckless impulse to shoot the works and the cautious massing of one’s resources for the morrow. — Bernard Baruch
Risk means more things can happen than will happen, that there is a range of outcomes out there. This is a fancy way of saying we don’t know what’s going to happen, but it’s a good way to think about it. If more things are going to happen than will happen, how large is that range, what are the extremes of it, what are the best kinds — risk means good things as well as bad things… What’s the upside, what’s the downside? What are the consequences to me if I do something wrong and the outcome is different from what I want, different from what I expect? This is how you begin to think about it. It really kind of begins with this idea, first of all, we don’t know what the future holds. This is — heads always shake up and down when you say that, but we tend to act as though we do know, but we have to keep reminding ourselves, particularly in this business. Particularly, you only look at the last week’s news, and we don’t know what’s going to happen. So you have to think about where am I placed in relation to the possible range of outcomes and where the surprises might be. — Peter Bernstein
While all the chatter and excitement is taking place about big stocks, big gains, and “three-baggers,” long-term investment success really depends on not losing — not taking major losses. We all know that a 50 percent loss requires a double the next time up just to get even, but still we strive for the Big Score, even though we also know full well that accidents happen most often to too-fast drivers; that Icarus got too close to the sun; that Enron Corporation, WorldCom, and many dot-coms had very high “new era” multiples before their obliteration. Large losses are forever — in investing, in teenage driving, and in fidelity. If you avoid large losses with a strong defense, the winnings will have every opportunity to take care of themselves. And large losses are almost always caused by trying to get too much by taking too much risk. — Charley Ellis
All booms are alike. The stage varies, but fundamentally they are as drops of water. Customs, like costumes, change from force of environment and economic conditions, but human nature remains the same. The autumn boom in Wall Street resembled all other stock booms, because the psychology of the boomers has not changed and cannot change. The Tulip Craze in Holland, or John Law’s Mississippi Scheme in France, or the South Sea Bubble in England in most things were the counterparts of the present speculation in the country. After all, booms are made by men, and not by stocks or flowers or town lots or wheat or mines or war. — Edwin Lefevre
It seems a truism to say that the old-time common-stock investor was not much interested in capital gains. He bought almost entirely for safety and income, and let the speculator concern himself with price appreciation. Today we are likely to say that the more experienced and shrewd the investor, the less attention he pays to dividend returns, and the more heavily his interest centers on long-term appreciation. Yet one might argue, perversely, that precisely because the old-time investor did not concentrate on future capital appreciation he was virtually guaranteeing to himself that he would have it, at least in the field of industrial stocks. And, conversely, today’s investor is so concerned with anticipating the future that he is already paying handsomely for it in advance. Thus what he has projected with so much study and care may actually happen and still not bring him any profit. If it should fail to materialize to the degree expected he may in fact be faced with a serious temporary and perhaps even permanent loss. — Benjamin Graham
Every great crisis reveals the excessive speculations of many houses which no one before suspected, and which commonly indeed had not begun or had not carried very far those speculations, till they were tempted by the daily rise of price and the surrounding fever… They speculate with it in bubble companies and in worthless shares, just as they did in the time of the South Sea mania, when there were no banks, and as they would again in England supposing that banks ceased to exist. The mania of 1825 and the mania of 1866 were striking examples of this; the delirium of ancient gambling co-operated with the milder madness of modern overtrading. At the very beginning of adversity, the counters in the gambling mania, the shares in the companies created to feed the mania, are discovered to be worthless; down they all go, and with them much of credit. The good times too of high price almost always engender much fraud. All people are most credulous when they are most happy; and when much money has just been made, when some people are really making it, when most people think they are making it, there is a happy opportunity for ingenious mendacity. Almost everything will be believed for a little while, and long before discovery the worst and most adroit deceivers are geographically or legally beyond the reach of punishment. — Walter Bagehot
While the internet boom lasted, nothing seemed able to deflate the bubble. Few internet and dotcom companies were profitable, but investors never seemed to mind. They looked at the number of customers or subscribers as the basis for valuing internet stocks. The name of the game became raising capital, not making profits. Even when fashionable stocks dipped, there was remarkably little effect on the rest of the market. People had learned that it pays to buy the dips and were not weaned from the habit until it ceased to pay… Despite its irrational aspects, the internet boom was more than a matter of inflated valuations. The optimism of the financial markets not only changed the “fundamentals” of individual businesses, it had real and profound effects throughout the whole economy. The boom did not only follow from the development of the internet; it accelerated that development and contributed to the speed and extension of technological innovation. The same was true in telecommunications, where the boom also accelerated the spread of new technology. — George Soros
The pendulum of investment psychology is constantly fluctuating between optimism and pessimism, between greed and fear, between credulousness and skepticism, between risk tolerance and risk aversion. It will always swing, and it is the presence of optimism, greed, credulousness, and risk tolerance that makes markets most dangerous… One of the first lessons I heard about pendulums and the swing of investor behavior regarded something I was taught in the early 1970s: the three stages of a bull market. These succinctly capture the essence of investor psychology. The first stage comes when a few people begin to realize that there will be improvement. The second stage occurs when most people realize that improvement is already taking place. The third stage comes when everyone thinks that things will be getting better forever. Clearly, the first is early; the last is laughably late. One of my favorite adages – perhaps my favorite of all – is that what the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end. So it’s the buyer in the third stage – who buys when optimism is incorporated, under the assumption that things will always get better – who pays the price. — Howard Marks
In the fund industry, the average manager lasts five years, and the average investor owns four funds, so that’s four managers in the first five years, eight managers after ten years, sixteen after twenty years, and fifty-two over the entire sixty-five years. What is the possibility that fifty-two managers, coming and going, cleaning out their portfolios time after time, could with remote conceivability do as well as the index? The return you get from holding the market portfolio over sixty-five years—even a modest return—demonstrates the “miracle of compounding returns,” and the tremendous impact the cost of active management makes is “the tyranny of compounding costs.” The way mathematics works, this tyranny absolutely overwhelms the miracle of compounding returns; to wit, over an investment lifetime the active equity fund investor captures about 20 percent of the return available simply by holding an all-market index fund. — John Bogle
Volatility matters on only two levels. First, if two portfolios have equal average returns, the portfolio with the lower volatility will earn the higher compound return. On the other hand, investors understand this phenomenon – either intellectually or intuitively – and tend to price volatile securities accordingly. The second consideration in volatility is much more important: when is the owner of the principal of the fund going to disburse that principal? A fund that is tied up in perpetuity could fluctuate all over the place without any consequences whatsoever. It is my impression that too many funds with long horizons are managed as though they were going to be disbursed in the next couple of years, largely because volatility makes people uncomfortable – which is irrelevant to the conditions on which a rational decision should rest. Fear of volatility can be costly to long-run returns and can unnecessarily constrain the freedom of managers to do their best. — Peter Bernstein
The only thing certain on the fortieth anniversary of the 1929 debacle is that some day, without fail, there will be another such disaster. The reason is that the stock market is inherently unstable, the instability being related to its superbly orchestrated ability to attract people with a promise of effortless riches, give them a taste of such gains, give them the promise of a great deal more gain, persuade them that it is rewarding their financial acuity or that of the people who are managing their money, and then, usually, after overcoming some preliminary setbacks, which greatly adds to the general state of confidence, destroy these illusions in one mortal thud. What is necessary for a new disaster is only for the memories of the last one to fade and no one knows how long that takes. — John Kenneth Galbraith
This investment management business, when stripped down to its bare essentials, is really quite simple. Now, why do I say that? Well, I think if we took the group here today and divided you up into smaller groups of four, or five, or six and asked you to talk about what’s really important in managing a portfolio that has a very long time horizon, I think that almost all the groups would come to very similar conclusions. If you’re investing with a long time horizon, having an equity bias makes sense; stocks go up in the long run… The other thing that I think would come out of the discussions is that diversification is important. Anybody whose read a basic finance text, as a matter of fact, I think anybody who thinks about investments in a common sense fashion knows that diversification is an important fundamental tenet of portfolio management. As a matter of fact, Harry Markowitz called diversification a “free lunch.” We spend all our time in Intro. Econ. figuring out there is no such thing as a free lunch but Markowitz tells us that diversification is a free lunch… For any given level of risk, you can increase the return; sounds pretty good. That’s pretty simple, right? Two tenets, an equity bias for portfolios with a long time horizon and diversification. — David Swensen
Investing is about making decisions with your money. All of those decisions are probabilistic. As former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin emphasizes in his new book, nothing is certain – except uncertainty – and decision procedures need to reflect that. In a recent speech, Fed Chairman Greenspan makes much the same point, and elaborates on the difference between the most likely outcome and low probability but high impact outcomes. Decision procedures and outcomes also need to be clearly distinguished. A decision is not bad or wrong because the outcome turns out badly. And a good decision is not the same as one that turns out well. A decision is bad if the process that engendered it was bad, regardless of the outcome. Bad outcomes — losing a lot of money in an investment — can happen even if the process is sound; and good outcomes can occur even if the process is lousy. A market that is mostly efficient can distribute outcomes all over the place. — Bill Miller
A lot of people think long-term investing is three weeks from next Wednesday, but when I talk about long-term investing I mean 5, 10, 20 years. During that length of time the market can experience ups and downs due to what I call “background noise.” Events occur – hurricanes, wars, political instability, currency and bank crises – that make investors nervous and cause market volatility. It does get nasty at times, but it shouldn’t cloud investors’ judgments about thinking long-term. The key organ here is your stomach. Everyone has the brainpower, but not everyone has the stomach for it… If you’re going to need money within 12 months to pay for a wedding or put a down payment on a house, the stock market is not the place to be. You can flip a coin over where the market is headed over the next year. I have no idea whether the next 1,000 points for the Dow or Nasdaq will be in positive or negative territory. But if you’re in the market for the long haul – 5, 10, or 20 years – then time is on your side and you should stick to your long-term investment plan. I would argue that the next 10,000 and 20,000 points for the market will be up. That’s been the long-term trend. The bottom line is to have a responsible plan for your investments and know what you own and why you own it. There’s too much at stake not to. — Peter Lynch
I regard my property largely as a trust. It is not mine absolutely. I take care of it on much the same principle as you would foster a valuable animal left in your charge. Of course my attitude in the premises was inherited. My father believed that the money left to one should be given over undiminished to the next generation. That also is my idea. He believed that one who inherited property had the right to spend the income it yielded, but not to waste the principal. About all that can be said is that my investments have been carefully chosen and have turned out well as a rule. A fortune cannot be built up around any fixed idea or, in other words, without the exercise of plain common sense. I buy when things are low and no one wants them. I keep them, just as I keep a considerable number of diamonds on hand, until they go up and people are anxious to buy. That is the general secret of business success. One thing, however, has been wrongly attributed to me, and that is speculating. I never speculate. Such stocks as belong to me were purchased simply as an investment, never on a margin. — Hetty Green
As Justice Holmes pointed out, though, “Certitude is not the test of certainty.” What I believe will happen in financial markets and what ends up happening have no necessary relationship. The future is uncertain, and the returns investors earn will depend on the nexus of actions taken and how events unfold. Financial history provides just that: history. Its ability to inform how we think about the future and to affect how we position assets would be dispositive if it were not for the most important feature of capital markets: nonstationarity. Nonstationarity refers to the degree to which the future does not resemble the past. If it were not for nonstationarity, we could just look to the past and unfailingly predict the future. The richest people would be those with the best databases. Librarians would be firing young aspirants to wealth on reality TV shows. Nonstationarity means that investment judgments are probabilistic and that even the best investment process will lead to undesirable results from time to time. Investment theorist Peter Bernstein noted that even if the expected value of the future were known with certainty, the standard deviation around that value would guarantee results that diverged from the averages, sometimes dramatically, and not always positively. — Bill Miller
I refuse to attach a permanence to anything I see around me — including the pessimism I read today in The Wall Street Journal. With my 60 years of experience, I can’t tell you that any of the enormous developments I’ve witnessed, including two world wars and the spread of communism, have had any identifiable long-term effect on common stock investment. When I started in the investment business, the first thing that happened was that World War I closed down the New York Stock Exchange for five months. It looked as if the end of the world had happened, but after a year and a half we were in the midst of a raging bull market. Six months ago all you needed was a minimum of intelligence and a maximum of courage to be bullish. That’s changed, of course. Now it requires less courage but more intelligence to find the values. — Benjamin Graham
Another very simple effect I very seldom see discussed either by investment managers or anybody else is the effect of taxes. If you’re going to buy something which compounds for 30 years at 15% per annum and you pay one 35% tax at the very end, the way that works out is that after taxes, you keep 13.3% per annum. In contrast, if you bought the same investment, but had to pay taxes every year of 35% out of the 15% that you earned, then your return would be 15% minus 35% of 15% or only 9.75% per year compounded. So the difference there is over 3.5%. And what 3.5% does to the numbers over long holding periods like 30 years is truly eye-opening. If you sit back for long, long stretches in great companies, you can get a huge edge from nothing but the way that income taxes work. Even with a 10% per annum investment, paying a 35% tax at the end gives you 8.3% after taxes as an annual compounded result after 30 years. In contrast, if you pay the 35% each year instead of at the end, your annual result goes down to 6.5%. So, you add nearly 2% of after-tax return per annum if you only achieve an average return by historical standards from common stock investments in companies with tiny dividend payout ratios… There are huge advantages for an individual to get into a position where you make a few great investments and just sit back and wait: You’re paying less to brokers. You’re listening to less nonsense. And if it works, the governmental tax system gives you an extra 1, 2 or 3 percentage points per annum compounded. – Charlie Munger
I think the idea of timing or hedging is a very difficult thing for investors to pull off. It is in the nature of the human psyche, we are much more likely—this is a behavioralist kind of argument—to make the wrong choices at the wrong time. We’ve compared returns earned by mutual fund investors—dollar-weighted returns—with returns earned by mutual funds themselves, or time-weighted returns, and the investors seem to lag the funds themselves by almost 3 percent per year. Fund investors put almost no money into equity funds in the late 1980s and early 1990s when stocks were cheap, and then they poured huge amounts of money into equity mutual funds between 1998 and the crash in 2000. Investors also bought the wrong kinds of funds, that is, in the three years leading up to the crash, they put nearly $500 billion into technology funds, telecommunications funds, and a whole new breed of aggressive growth funds we can describe as “new economy” funds. At the same time, they took about $100 billion out of value funds. Then, after the market crashed, they took money out of those aggressive growth funds and put it into value funds. Overall, investors seem to have an innate sense of bad timing. You can actually measure this. – John Bogle
Being able to recognize when you’re wrong is a godsend… A good bit of the Munger fortune came from liquidating things we originally purchased because we were wrong. Of course, you have to learn to change your mind when you’re wrong. And I actually work at trying to discard beliefs. And most people try and cherish whatever idiotic notion they already have, because they think if it’s their notion, it must be good. And I think, of course you want to be re-examining what you previously thought, particularly when disconfirming evidence comes through. And there’s hardly anything more important than being rational and objective. Just think of all the dumb things you can do in life. Think of the brilliant people who are just utterly brilliant, who’s doing some of the dumbest things. You won’t have any trouble thinking of examples. Most of us can think about our own actions in the last year or two, and we can all pull up an example or two. It’s hard to be rational. — Charlie Munger
We do pay attention to what's going on; we read extensively; we listen to what our friends in the business say, what the sell side people say, what people on television say. All of that is input into the way we think about things. But, our judgment is that the market is pretty good about incorporating the present state of affairs into stock prices or bond prices. And so, I'm fond of telling the analysts, if it's in the newspapers, it's in the price. So you really need to understand what isn't in the price, what isn't being discounted, what events can happen that will lead the market to think differently about things. -- Bill Miller
The much wider fluctuations in investment common stocks that have come about since World War I have made it practically impossible for buyers of common stocks to disregard price changes. It would be extremely unwise — and hypocritical — for anybody to buy a list of common stocks and say that he was interested only in his dividend return and cared nothing at all about price changes. The problem is not whether price changes should be disregarded — because clearly they should not be — but rather in what way can the investor and the security analyst deal intelligently with the price changes which take place… The fact that investors have been willing to pay so much for so-called quality, and so much for so-called future prospects, on the average, that they have themselves introduced serious speculative elements into common stock valuations. These elements are bound to create fluctuations in their own attitude, because quality and prospects are psychological factors. The dividend, of course, is not a psychological factor; it is more or less of a fixed datum. Matters of the former kind — I am speaking now of prospects and quality — are subject to wide changes in the psychological attitude of the people who buy and sell stocks. — Ben Graham
Perhaps enough has been said to indicate the principal difficulties which beset the speculator who attempts to profit by the short swings of the stock. For practical purposes the occurrence of ripples and waves in the price movement is unpredictable. To attempt to trade on such movements is mere gambling with the odds against the trader by a considerable margin. It is astounding that thousands of otherwise intelligent persons persist in trying to make money in this way. Commonly accepted figures of somewhat dubious origin are frequently cited to show that 90% to 95% of all margin trades lose money in the stock market. The deep-seated gambling instinct, the well-founded belief that in widely fluctuating markets there must be opportunities for profit nevertheless bring fresh recruits to the brokerage offices in constant streams. A few of them ultimately learn the methods by which money may actually be made in the stock market. — Philip Carret
We actually can see and indeed measure how badly investors do at timing. They’re their own worst enemy. As Warren Buffett says, the two greatest enemies of equity investors are expenses and emotions. You can see the expenses in the gap between the market return and fund returns, and the emotions in the gap between fund returns and investor returns. When you look at data on the origin of these shortfalls, it is staggeringly loaded toward the degree of fund specialization; in other words, the biggest gap between fund time-weighted returns and fund investor dollar-weighted returns is found in technology funds, telecommunications funds, aggressive growth funds. We did a study that covered six years, i.e., the last three years of the up market and the first three years of the down market. With the ups and downs taken together, the twenty-five largest sector funds actually returned about 5.5 percent per year, versus 3.7 percent for the twenty-five largest diversified funds. However, while the typical investor in the diversified mutual funds ran about 2 percent behind the funds themselves, the investors in these specialty funds fell short of the fund returns by about 14 percent a year, which, when compounded over six years, is a staggering shortfall of 59 percent. — John Bogle
If you’re going to seek out volatility because that’s where opportunity is, you don’t want your entire portfolio to be volatile, you only want to make volatile bets within it. You have to be sure that there’s some systematic arrangement of the bets that you make so that the portfolio risk in the total portfolio is not as volatile as the individual components. One of Markowitz’s great insights was precisely that. That you can take a lot of high-risk bets—as long as they’re not correlated—and come out fine... As I said, the markets are macro-inefficient. They can go haywire. That is a matter that you deal with through your asset allocation in the first place, so that you don’t get killed if the totally unexpected hits you in the face… My own affairs are run that way because I know that extreme outcomes can happen and I don’t want to get killed. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not making bets in the middle of the portfolio somewhere. — Peter Bernstein
What the economists call fabrication or demand in use is inversely correlated with price. Or, more simply, you know, if gasoline prices go up, other things equal, you’re going to drive less. So price and demand are inversely correlated: basic economics. And that’s the way it is for things that are used. But in financial markets, it isn’t the case. That actually, demand is positively correlated with price. More people buy things when they go up; if stocks start to go up, more people want them than if they’re going down. The higher they go up, the greater the demand for them. That’s why you see people chasing mutual fund performance; it’s why you see the bubbles that you saw in technology and Internet stocks where all the money flowed in after they’d gone up a lot… It’s been very well established that demand follows price. — Bill Miller