A Viennese Waltz vs a Stumbling Drunk

Mark Skousen is one of my favorite living economists because of my bias for the practical. Skousen has a PhD in economics, but he chose to pursue a career in the private sector as an investment adviser rather than one in academia or government. We need more great economists like Skousen. Their impact will be much greater than that of academics because those of us who need practical advice are much greater than the number of people who will major in economics in college. Also, if you wander through the blogs of Austrian academics you’ll find that academics spend a great deal of time on Quixotic efforts like trying to change Fed policy or reform mainstream economics.

Laissez Faire Books has released a collection of essays by Skousen with the clever title A Viennese Waltz Down Wall Street: Austrian Economics for Investors. It answers the classic book A Random Walk down Wall Street, by Burt Malkiel that promotes the mainstream vision of the Efficient Market Hypothesis.

Markov Confirms ABCT

Greg Davies and Arnaud de Servigny offer a different take on diversification in their book Behavioral Investment Management: An Efficient Alternative to Modern Portfolio Theory. Chapter 6, “Representing Asset Return Dynamics in an Uncertain Environment was the most interesting chapter to me, and the one that adds confirmation to using the ABCT as a guide to timing the market. 

Modern portfolio theory tells investors to diversify their portfolios at least between two asset classes, stocks and bonds. A simplistic summary of the method is to use the statistical measure called standard deviation to assess the risks of asset classes and diversify according to risk. But in reality, advisers have found that a fixed ratio, say 70% stocks and 30% bonds, often works better without requiring as much work.