Cliff Asness of AQR: Bubble Logic

I'm reading a passage from Scott Patterson's book, The Quants, that looks back on the .com bubble. Let me share a few brief quotes from this section with you here.

Backdrop: "A few months before the dot-com IPO frenzy began, LTCM had collapsed. Greenspan and the Fed swept in organizing a bailout. Greenspan also slashed interest rates...the easy money added fuel to the smoldering internet fires...pushing the tech-laden Nasdaq to all-time highs on an almost daily basis."

The .com boom proved disastrous for Cliff Asness' hedge fund, AQR, which invested in value stocks while "betting against companies his models deemed expensive".

After agonizing over the fund's poor performance and the perceived boundless stupidity of market participants, Asness finally came to a realization about markets and crowds: investor irrationality does not stay within expected, "just right" modeled bounds.

Surveying the scene near the peak of the internet bubble in 2000, Asness expanded on his views in an academic paper entitled, "Bubble Logic: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love the Bull".

Enjoy the historical market overview - maybe you'll find some lessons that apply to the markets of 2012 and beyond.

Finance Trends 2019 Mid-Year Markets Review

Email subscribers of the Finance Trends Newsletter receive the first look at new articles and market updates, such as the following piece, sent out to our email list on Sunday (6/14). Hello and welcome, everyone! If you received our last email notice over the July 4th holiday, you'll know that this weekend's newsletter will serve as a mid-year market update and a follow-up to issue #29, " How to Reinvest in a Rising Market ". Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, let's start the show... Finance Trends Newsletter: Our Mid-Year Market Review When we last spoke, back in February, the U.S. stock market was rallying off its December-January lows. As the S&P 500 and Nasdaq reclaimed their 200 day moving averages in February and March, it became increasingly apparent that a lot of retail investors (and perhaps some institutional investors) were left under-invested while watching this recovery move from the sidelines. The U.S. stock ...

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Finance Trends Letter

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