Tadas Viskanta is the Founder and Editor of Abnormal Returns. Tadas is a private investor with over 25 years of experience in the financial markets. He is the co-author of over a dozen investment-related papers that have appeared in publications like the Financial Analysts Journal, Journal of Portfolio Management among others. Tadas is also the author of the well-received book: Abnormal Returns: Winning Strategies from the Frontlines of the Investment Blogosphere that culls lessons learned from his time blogging.
Five Good Questions:
With traditional media, TV, bloggers, twitter, etc., there’s so much information flow these days. It can feel overwhelming. How do we go about curating signal from noise? As special businesses have transitioned from primarily key PPE advantages (more readily quantifiable by accounting) to instead relying on IP, knowledge, network effects, intangibles (less quantifiable and more subjective), you could make an argument that the balance sheet is increasingly divorcing from economic reality. Given this trend, does a quantitatively driven approach to value investing still work in the future? I’ve heard many great investors say you shouldn’t compare yourself to the S&P, and yet every does. What do you personally use for your benchmarks? You often hear that ETFs are a better mousetrap? What exactly makes them so much better than mutual funds? You have an interesting quote: “The primary role of the financial system is to coax risk-adverse investors into risky securities.” What did you mean by that, and do you think it’s even more of an issue with zero interest rate policies like we see today?