No. of Recommendations: 13
One question on US Investment and your disinterest. Don't mechanical methods preclude you from ever having to make a judgement like you made? It seems like you should care less about the political and let price is truth dictate decision making. Just an observation.
If all I cared about was returns, then sure. I always assumed that my elimination of US securities might hurt me financially, but optimizing returns wasn't the reasoning. (as it hapens I've done outstandingly so far since the decision, but I don't draw a causal link). There are many investments which I consider odious, like tobacco firms, or jurisdictionally insecure like China, so I simply don't invest in those.
I could always run quant or semi-quant methods outside the US, and I've done a little of that, but the data availability, particularly for backtesting, makes it a whole lot harder. And I've done a lot better in a few firms I know well than I did with my quant stuff.
Jim
