McKinsey: Long game is best play
Calls for a long-term investment focus have lacked a sophisticated metric to back them up – until now. The McKinsey Global Institute has found tangible benefits from shunning short-termism.
Calls for a long-term investment focus have lacked a sophisticated metric to back them up – until now. The McKinsey Global Institute has found tangible benefits from shunning short-termism.
This paper investigates the extent to which the delegation of funds management prevents long-term information acquisition, inducing short-termism in financial markets. The authors, Catherine Casamatta and Sebastien Pouget also study the design of long-term fund managers’ compensation contracts. Under moral hazard, fund managers’ compensation optimally depends on both short-term and long-term fund performance. Short-term performance
What would the financial services industry look like if it was structured to service the non-financial services sector, rather than itself? Economist John Kay, author of the Kay Review into short termism in UK equity markets, aims to find out. In an ideal world there would be one, maybe two, intermediaries between the saver
It is easy for long-term investors to avoid short termism, and the solution lies in avoiding momentum and conducting risk analysis using cash flows – not market pricing. “Diversification is a joke. Diversification and risk analysis relies on pricing, but pricing is distorted because it’s driven by momentum,” says Paul Woolley, chairman of the Paul
Solving short-termism is being held up by the institutional investment industry as some sort of performance saviour. There have been many attempts at uncovering the problems of, and offering solutions to, short-termism with numerous reviews, conferences and papers discussing the need for long-term investing. These include the incentives and behaviour of asset owners, asset managers
For many people their most memorable in situ news moment is when man landed on the moon or when John Lennon, Princess Diana or Michael Jackson died. But most Italians will remember where they were when Pope Benedict XVI resigned. A country with record unemployment, no head of state and no head of the church
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