Verum Insights...

In real-world Finance, they don't pay for elegance. They pay for power - predictive power.

The New Finance focused on the market's major systematic mistake. In failing to appreciate the strength of competitive forces in a market economy, it over estimates the length of the short run. In doing so, it overreacts to records of success and failure for individual companies, driving the prices of successful firms too high and their unsuccessful counterparts too low.

In going directly to Investment Heaven, you build your portfolio as you would build a wonderful company through a merger and acquisition program. You specify the way you want your portfolio to look, and then you assemble the profile piece by piece by bringing together companies that make their own individual contributions to the desired character.

Although efficient markets people still go around saying there is a "mountain" of evidence supporting their hypothesis, the truth of the matter is that it's a very old mountain that's now eroding rapidly into the sea.

Behaviorists tell us that we tend to overweight and overreact to the most recently received information. If we do, we will find that the information that we thought was so important becomes tempered, and reduced in significance, by new and related information that follows.

Less volatile stocks tend to have negative abnormal profits; more volatile stocks tend to have positive abnormal profits.

If we observe the performance of only those funds that remain active, we will tend to find that the average performance of the surviving funds exceeds that of the market.

When you buy a lottery ticket, you don't know how tickets have been sold. But sold they have been. And there is an underlying distribution for the game.

So you see, in the end, it is nearly certain that the power of prediction must triumph over the arrogance of elegance.