Can You Beat the Market?

This got more attention than I expected on Twitter, Facebook, etc., so thought I'd highlight it here:

Still think you can beat the market?, by Tim Harford: One of the most maligned ideas in economics is the efficient market hypothesis... The EMH has various forms, but in brief its message is very simple: an individual investor cannot reliably outperform financial markets. The reasoning is equally simple... Anything that could reasonably be anticipated already has been anticipated, and so markets instead respond only to genuinely unexpected news.

But the EMH has a problem: researchers keep discovering predictable patterns in the data... That is a minor embarrassment for the EMH; and it becomes a major one if the anomalies persist after they have been discovered. Yet this seems doubtful. ...

A new research paper by David McLean and Jeffrey Pontiff explicitly examines the idea that academic research into anomalies is a self-denying endeavor. They find some evidence of spurious patterns... But what is really striking is that after an anomaly has been published, it quickly shrinks – although it does not disappear.

The anomalies are most likely to persist when they apply to small, illiquid markets – as one might expect, because there it is harder to profit from the anomaly.

The efficient markets hypothesis is surely false. What is striking is that it is very close to being true. For the Warren Buffetts of the world, “almost true” is not true at all. For the rest of us, beating the market remains an elusive dream.