Selling Is Hard

Interesting article from Bloomberg Businessweek noting that selling is the hard part of stock picking.

The researchers looked at more than 4 million trades among 783 portfolios from 2000 to 2016 and found that stockpickers actually showed skill when buying. However, the sales by these institutional investors cost them as much as 100 basis points, or a full percentage point, of yearly returns compared with a no-skill strategy of simply selling holdings at random, according to the study Selling Fast and Buying Slow by researchers from the University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, and portfolio analytics firm Inalytics Ltd. The study concluded that one of the likely reasons for the discrepancy was “asymmetric allocation of cognitive resources.” Translation: Investors spend way more time analyzing what to buy than what to sell.

Read the whole thing.

Posted by on February 19th, 2019 at 9:43 am


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