Cliff Asness, founder and CIO of AQR Capital Management, shares his candid insights on market efficiency and investment strategies. He argues that social media and low interest rates are making markets less efficient, causing asset prices to stray from their true values. Asness critiques the legacy of the efficient market hypothesis and discusses how technology is reshaping investment dynamics. He also dives into the complexities of integrating ESG principles into investments, emphasizing the need for transparency and a balance between insights and data in finance.
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insights INSIGHT
Markets Prone to Extreme Inefficiency
Markets are prone to extreme inefficiency due to bubbles like the dot-com and recent COVID era ones.
These episodes show markets get materially less efficient during such times and prices disconnect from fundamentals.
insights INSIGHT
Investment Strategies and Market Efficiency
Some investment strategies like value investing clearly promote market efficiency by backing undervalued assets.
Momentum strategies are ambiguous; they can either push prices toward or away from equilibrium depending on market conditions.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Balance Theory and Data
Use both theory-driven ideas and data analysis in investment research; neither alone suffices.
Increasingly rely on data and machine learning to detect subtle signals not obvious to intuition.
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In this book, Robert J. Shiller examines the forces that drive market volatility, including cultural, psychological, and structural factors. He discusses how events such as technological advancements and demographic changes can precipitate market bubbles, and how these bubbles are reinforced by media coverage and 'new era' economic thinking. The book also explores psychological anchors and herd behavior, as well as attempts to rationalize market exuberance through theories like efficient markets and random walks. Shiller provides prescriptions for policy changes and investor strategies to mitigate the effects of speculative volatility.
Are financial markets becoming less efficient? Famous investor Cliff Asness certainly thinks so. In his paper published last year, “The Less-Efficient Market Hypothesis,” Asness argues that social media and low interest rates, among other factors, have distorted market information so that stocks have become disconnected from their true values. This distortion has directed funds toward undeserving assets and firms and staved off necessary market corrections.
Asness is the founder, managing principal, and chief investment officer at AQR Capital Management. He is an active researcher on various financial and investment topics and received an MBA and PhD in finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. From her early days as a journalist reporting on Wall Street, Bethany recounts Asness as an outspoken, successful quant investor: one who invests based primarily on the fundamentals of the market rather than those of the firm. She also remembers him being “colloquial” and willing to be “experimental” with ideas. Asness’s recent paper continues that experimental style as he challenges the legacy of the efficient market hypothesis on which his PhD advisor, Nobel Prize laureate Eugene Fama, made his name, and which argues that asset prices reflect all available information, making it impossible to “beat” or outperform the market.
Asness joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss how the market has fundamentally changed due to new technologies and macroeconomic trends and how investment strategies must adapt, what these changes mean for long-term productivity and growth, how researchers and investors should think about emerging market factors like tariffs and artificial intelligence, and why he's not investing in TrumpCoin anytime soon.
Disclosure: In October 2024, Chicago Booth received a $60 million gift from Cliff Asness and John Liew to name its Master in Finance program.
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