Perfect and Felicity Foresight

Conclusion: Hindsight is the worst investment method - reading newspapers won't help. Forget about predicting the future precisely.

Felicity Foresight confirms the Black Swan thesis that nobody knows the future precisely.  Thereby, most of a portfolio should be protected from the Black Swan. 

We learn a simple hindsight strategy works the worst. It yields about 7% per year - a little better than a savings account.  Inflation over the 100y period is 3%/y or $1 in 1900 is $20 today. 

A simple contrarian strategy works better but not the best.  Most value investors such as Buffett work on reversion to the mean but over a number of years not simply the last year's worst performer.  They handily beat the market averages.

From Econophysics blog-

So what is the 'Foresight Saga'? The Foresight Saga was a gedanken (i.e., thought experiment) conducted by The Economist magazine in its fin de siecle (1999) Christmas issue. The Economist magazine created an imaginary character named 'Felicity Foresight' who was able to perfectly predict the performance of financial markets -- across different asset classes and across borders -- for each and every upcoming year from January 1st 1900 onwards.

Starting with an initial investment of $1 in January 1st 1900 (and by reinvesting any dividends and/or interest income in the coming years), Felicity Foresight would decide at the beginning of each year which investment would bring the highest return (capital gain plus income) for that year and put all her wealth into that single asset. She would repeat this process year after year, shifting her funds to match her new forecast for each and every year starting from the year 1900.

How did Felicity do? By January 1st 2000, she managed to turn $1 into $1.3 quadrillion even after deducting transaction costs and taxes. Compared to the $9,000 she would have earned had the $1 been invested in a broad collection of American stocks, Felicity Foresight's performance is truly staggering! The last time The Economist checked in on Ms. Foresight (January 2, 2003), her investment acumen more than doubled her portfolio (to $2.7 quadrillion). [Note: All figures in this paragraph are the revised figures from the 2003 article, and not from the original 1999 article.]

Henry Hindsight follows the same investment process that Felicity does with one major exception: Henry invests in the previous year's best performing asset. In other words, Henry Hindsight is like most investors, following 'fashions' and 'trends.' Henry's initial $1 invested at the beginning of 1900 would have only grown to $783 -- much less than either Felicity's portfolio or investing in a broad index of American shares.

Charlie Contrarian, on the other hand, invested in the previous year's worst performing asset (apparently believing in a sort of 'mean reversion'). Charlie did somewhat better than Henry -- turning his $1 into $1,730 in a century of investing -- but not as well as either Felicity or a broad index of U.S. equity.

One of the things we can learn from this thought experiment is that financial experts often underestimate the effects of taxes and transaction costs. If Felicity's portfolio had been constructed without those costs, it would have grown to $27.5 quintillion; i.e., 99.99% of potential investment wealth was eliminated by transaction costs and taxes (along with effects of compounding). Many experts tend to think of these kinds of costs to be negligible and readily dismiss them, but this extreme example demonstrates that investment costs can add up -- or, more precisely, compound -- to a sizable amount in the long run.

The Foresight Saga is more about hindsight than foresight ... gendankens and empirical studies like this one can place us back in time to see how those who came before us (or even ourselves in the distant past, if we are old enough) viewed their future ... and usually got it wrong! The most important lesson to learn from Felicity Foresight's amazing track record as an investor is how all of us, in reality, lack such consistently perfect foresight about our future.

From a money management view, Buffett's hero, Ben Graham, recommended keeping a sizable portion in bonds 40%-60% depending on whether stocks were cheap.  Other money management studies indicate you should be 'stingy when you're up'.  With more money, you should bet less and less. As such, you're less susceptible to a downturn.  Of course, most people do the opposite.