Blog Posts

#6: The (Agnostic) Big Picture of Investing

In February of this year, I began working on a document that summarizes everything I think I know about investing in a written philosophy. This is partly an exercise for my main job, and partly a personal project. 2025 marks the 10th year since I bought my first book on investing. So I think this is a good milestone for such a document.

A few days ago, I finished the data-part of the project and the first major draft of the document should also be ready soon. To get things going and to create a public reference for some charts, I will publish them upfront in this post.

Think of this as a chartbook for (hopefully) interesting long-run data on major asset classes and simple multi-asset portfolios. Except for a few explanatory notes, I will leave the charts largely without comments. I leave that to the actual document and I believe that readers will find their own interpretations anyway.

One final word to manage expectations. You will not find overly complicated research or methodology. In fact, all of it is (in my view) quite simple. That is by design. One goal I have with this project is to do it without jargon, complicated math, or other prerequisites. Any person who is willing to spend some time and brainpower should walk away with an overall understanding of investing.

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#5: Working for 4 Years

Despite good resolutions, I haven’t written something for quite some time. The reasons were the same as ever: my primary job (I startet a new position on July 1) and two other projects that took longer than expected (see Investing Resources and Research Papers). Anyway. After switching jobs, I wrote down a few learnings and observations from my first position in the investment industry. I startet as a Junior Portfolio Manager on November 1, 2020, so today marks my fourth year of full-time working. There is hardly a better occasion to break the period of inactivity than that.

10 Learnings, Observations, and Opinions:

  • Market Efficiency
  • Investment Industry
  • Generalist vs. Specialist
  • Good Things are Rare
  • “Professional” Investors
  • Details vs. Big Picture
  • Facts vs. Opinions
  • Discipline and Structure
  • Purpose and Society
  • The Best is Yet to Come

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#4: Warren Buffett is not an Index Hugger

Two weeks ago, the Financial Times (FT) Unhedged Newsletter (URL) joined many others to write about Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway (BRK) in the week of its famous annual general meeting in Omaha. The FT also published an outstanding series on the future of Berkshire Hathaway without the now 93 year-old legendary CEO and Chairman (URL).

I stumbled across some statements in the two Unhedged Newsletters “Warren Buffett: The world’s richest index-hugger” (URL) and “Berkshire’s next move” (URL) from May 6 and 7, respectively. I have nothing qualified to say about Buffett’s succession, but I do believe the statement that Warren Buffett is an index hugger deserves some more discussion.

  • Berkshire Hathaway’s returns over the last 21 years
  • Berkshire Hathaway’s “risk” over the last 21 years
  • What is risk?
  • Berkshire Hathaway in good and bad markets
  • Is Warren Buffett an index hugger?

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How to Use This Site

After more than one year and just short of 100 posts, it is more than overdue to bring some structure to the page. From now on, I will organize the content on AgnosticInvesting.com by two (hopefully) very simple principles:

  • Each post belongs to exactly one category or sub-category.
  • Each post gets multiple tags. Those tags are again grouped for better filtering.

Filtering by categories will thus give you a unique list of all posts within a category. Filtering by tags will give you all posts about the desired topic across categories.

You will always find the current structure in this post or, if you are on desktop, in the right sidebar.

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#3: Big Data & Machine Learning in Asset Management

This week I gave a talk on “Big Data and Machine Learning in Asset Management” at Goethe-University in Frankfurt. Thanks again to my thesis-supervisor Sasan Mansouri for the invitation. In this post I will summarize a few points of the talk and share the slides. The key result is the following framework to evaluate investment strategies that claim to use big data and machine learning. I also apply this to several real world funds.

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#2: Copy-Paste Outperformance

Every year, US companies must publish three quarterly and one annual report. Preparing those reports, however, is a lot of effort, does not improve operations, and reveals information to competitors.

How to deal with this? Correct, spend the time to create one comprehensive template and reuse it as long as possible. In an excellent research paper titled “Lazy Prices” (2020), the authors show that US companies are no exception from this: many annual and quarterly reports are basically just updated copies from the previous year.

What does this mean for investors? Since most of the report is just copy-paste, they should rather focus on differences between the current and previous report (for example, new paragraphs). It turns out that such changes are indeed very important: quantitative measures for report copy-paste predict future stock returns and help to achieve outperformance vs. common US indices.


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#1: Why the Name AGNOSTIC INVESTING?

Why is this website called AGNOSTIC INVESTING?

There are several reasons:
– I am not very creative
– It is what I am planning to do
– It starts with A

I believe that agnostically looking at facts and data should, at some point, lead to decent results. Like (almost) everyone else, I don’t have the ultimate investing strategy. Being agnostic is therefore my only chance.

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