As with all investment, it’s a question of timing

In the world of investing, everyone is always looking for a better mousetrap – a way to beat the market. One approach that is increasingly popular is to select shares based on specific “factors” – for example, the size of companies or their dividend yield. The trend has been given the ugly name of “smart beta”.

A recent survey of institutional investors showed three-quarters were either using or evaluating the approach. By the end of January some $534bn was invested in smart-beta exchange-traded funds, according to ETFGI, a research firm. Compound annual growth in assets under management in the sector has been 30% over the past five years.

The best argument for smart-beta funds is that they simply replicate, at lower cost, what fund managers are doing already. For example, many fund managers follow the “value” approach, seeking out shares that look cheap. A computer program can pick these stocks more methodically than an erratic human. A smart-beta fund does what it says on the tin.

But does it work? The danger here is “data mining”. Carry out enough statistical tests, and you will always find some strategy that worked in the past.

Read the full article on The Economist’s web site

Are technology firms madly overvalued? Is the technology industry in La La Land?

There are alarming signs. House prices in San Francisco have risen by 66% more than in New York over the past five years. Even at the height of the dotcom bubble in 2001, the gap was lower, at 58%. Shares of technology firms trade on their highest ratio to sales since the turn of the century. Four of the world’s most valuable firms are tech companies: Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon. Snap, a tiddler with $400m of sales and $700m of cash losses in 2016, is expected to list shares on March 1st that will give it a valuation of over $20bn.

For companies and investors in any industry, it is hard to work out if you are living in a bubble. To help, Schumpeter has created three sanity tests for global tech firms.

Read the full article on The Economist’s web site

Bubbles are rarer than you think – and very hard to recognise until it is too late.

Bubbles put the fun into financial history. Who can resist stories about Dutch tulips that were worth more than country estates or the floating of an “undertaking of great advantage but no one to know what it is”?

Economists have long debated whether bubbles can be identified, or indeed stopped, before they can cause widespread damage, as the crisis of 2007-08 did. But spotting them is easier said than done: even tulipmania may have been caused by a quirk in the wording of contracts that meant speculators would, at worst, walk away with only a tiny loss.

Read the full article on The Economist’s web site