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Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Billionaire fund manager explains why so many missed the stock market rally
Billionaire fund manager explains why so many missed the stock market rally originally appeared on TheStreet. Stock market rally leaves many on sidelines after huge move Since President Trump paused most reciprocal tariffs on April 9, the stock market's gains have been eye-popping. Following a nausea-inspiring 19% drop from mid-February through early April, the S&P 500 has marched over 25% higher, setting new records in July. The gains likely have surprised many investors who were convinced that the economy was on the precipice of disaster, facing tariff-driven inflation and inevitable job situation, however, has proven far better than feared. So far, tariffs' impact on inflation has been muted, and the unemployment rate has stayed mostly flat. The potential for a better-than-hoped-for economy has left many on the sidelines, convinced that stocks will roll back to new lows. According to billionaire fund manager Ken Fisher, the thinking that led investors to sell stocks during the downturn may be deeply flawed. Fisher, the founder of Fisher Investments, a money manager with over $332 billion of assets under management, is worth a staggering $11.7 billion, good enough to rank 261st on Bloomberg's Billionaires Index. Fisher clearly knows a thing or two about making money in the market. This week, he explained, in one word, one of the biggest mistakes investors make in periods like this, while also offering a simple solution. Fisher Investments Ken Fisher sums up huge investor problem with blunt description Fisher has been investing professionally since founding Fisher Investments in 1979, so he knows a thing or two because he's seen a thing or two. His long career includes navigating the inflation-fueled early 1980s, Black Monday in 1987, the Savings & Loan Crisis, the Internet boom (and bust!), the Great Recession, Covid, and 2022's bear all those periods, he's noted one big mistake many investors make that slows their path to financial freedom, something he described recently with one word on "X" as "Breakevenitis." It's understandable to get nervous about portfolio values during market pullbacks, corrections, and bear markets. Retirement is expensive, and surging US debt creates a real risk that Social Security may not be able to keep pace with inflation in retirement, making the value of our investments in our retirement and personal accounts even more important. However, market drawdowns are common. Pullbacks of about 5% happen on average once per year, while 10% corrections occur every few years, according to Capital Group. Even 20% of bear markets are relatively frequent if you consider a 40-year career, happening about every six years. As a result, how investors react during these many sell-offs can significantly impact portfolio balances in your sixties, when retirement is knocking on the door. Fisher explains why 'breakevenitis' is so dangerous to investors Market sell-offs are usually driven by fear that is either false or overdone, according to Fisher. In either case, investors tend to sell during the downturn or near the low to limit losses because the pain of loss significantly exceeds the good feelings that come with gains, something economic behaviorists like Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler have considered extensively. Kahneman helped develop prospect theory, which popularized the concept of loss aversion. This theory states that people prefer small guaranteed outcomes over larger risky outcomes. Thaler's work maintains that the risk of loss is twice as powerful as the pleasure of that backdrop, it's not hard to understand why investors' emotionally driven decision-making often results in illogical choices, and breakevenitis is a prime example. Fisher describes it as the desire by investors who held through the downturn to sell their stocks once they return to flat, or breakeven. Fisher points out that rallies off downturns that return stocks to prior highs rarely roll over again and back to new lows. Instead, they continue higher, leaving sellers hoping to be proven right disappointed and portfolio values impaired. "People that get out looking for an all-clear signal later invariably miss the big gains," wrote Fisher. How to avoid breakevenitis and build a bigger portfolio Emotions have an outsized impact on our decisions, and since the stock market has historically traded higher over time, decisions that result in selling can often damage portfolios the most. Fisher thinks a simple solution can allow your portfolio to avoid falling victim to breakevenitis. "Breakevenitis is a disease that affects people, and there's a simple cure for it. Every time you get a correction and you're tempted to get out... look at the history of the returns after correction and after bear markets. No matter which you're in... the returns are bigger than any risk you could possibly have." For example, according to Sam Stovall of CFRA Research, the S&P 500 historically gains 38% in the first year of a new bull market and 12% in year two. Fisher recommends that if you feel emotionally driven to sell, consider the money you could leave on the table when stocks find their footing. While selling can protect you in the short term from losses, getting back in requires you to be right twice. You must get out before the downturn and back in on the upswing. It's tough to do that, especially when emotions are running amok. What does this mean for investors? Stocks typically go higher and lower than you think possible. Because people don't all act at once to buy or sell, when stocks are rising after a sharp sell-off, money trapped on the sidelines waiting for another dip often trickles back into stocks, helping to support stocks on pullbacks. Of course, anything can happen, but Fisher's point is that those invested in the stock market who stay the course do better than those who react emotionally, succumbing to things like 'breakevenitis.' If you're investing in individual stocks, all bets are off. Stocks can, and often have, gone to zero. However, suppose you're investing in a diversified fund or index. In that case, the odds are that a stock market recovery following a sell-off can create an opportunity for greater growth, suggesting that investors who hold pat, or dollar-cost average into the sell-off, fund manager explains why so many missed the stock market rally first appeared on TheStreet on Jul 25, 2025 This story was originally reported by TheStreet on Jul 25, 2025, where it first appeared. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Bloomberg
3 hours ago
- Bloomberg
Private Equity Finds Opportunity in America's Child Care Crisis
Parents in the US pay an average of $11,582 per year for child care for children under the age of 15. And private equity sees an opportunity, by racing to consolidate independent daycares. Easy access to capital propels their growth, but child care experts warn that debt‑loaded roll‑ups drive teacher turnover and can implode suddenly, wiping out the access they seek to provide in large numbers. Vermont's new publicly funded program is an example of a model that works - a payroll tax and disclosure of child care center ownership to provide access to those who need it. (Source: Bloomberg)
Forbes
4 hours ago
- Forbes
7 Business Lessons For AI
From above photo of an anonymous African-American woman analyzing business graph on a laptop ... More computer while sitting at restaurant desk with notebook, pen and eyeglasses. When considering any implementation of AI in a business, leadership teams have a weighty responsibility. This is an approach that people want to get right. They face a few challenges – that the technology is so nascent, that there doesn't seem to be a lot of road maps available for companies, and that many people instinctively distrust large language models to automate processes. So what's to be done? A Leader's Perspective Here's where I recently got some insights from a paper written by Lidiane Jones, who was previously head of Slack, and CEO of Bumble, a major dating platform. Jones breaks down some of the aspects of AI implementation that C-suite people are looking at. Data Transfers and Governance Jones points out that transformations like ETL (extract, transform, load) and ELT (extract, load, transform) predated AI, but data is still siloed in many cases. One solution Jones touts is an 'omnichannel data strategy' – this, she writes, 'will ensure privacy and security of your data, ease of access for business applications, offer real time capabilities and can integrate with your everyday tools.' Compliance with Financial Data Rules For example, Jones speaks about the need to focus on compliance in some areas. 'Every company has critical financial data, subject to audit, regulation and compliance that must be carefully protected,' she writes. 'Normally, for more scaled companies, this data sits on an ERP system. Every CEO, CFO, COO and CRO needs critical real-time insight from these systems, to determine how the business is performing against plans, how expenses are tracking against the budget or how a change in employee investment … will affect the overall cost structure and velocity of the business, among numerous other capital allocation considerations.' Business Intelligence for the Win In terms of general business intelligence, Jones spins a story to illustrate: 'Imagine a Sales Executive who develops a multi-year high trust relationship with one of a company's most important large customer, and she decides to leave the company for a better career opportunity,' she writes. 'Historically, though there will be good information about that customer and notes from this leader, much of her institutional knowledge leaves with her. Corporate human knowledge exists within organizations, and is shaped by the culture, people and business processes.' She then addresses the role of workflow tools and other platform resources. 'Collaboration software of all kinds like Slack, Google Workspace and Teams … have a lot of people's knowledge embedded in them that is hardly ever nurtured,' she adds. 'Unstructured data like this is highly effective in training LLMs, and can provide opportunities that haven't existed before - like capturing the sentiment of what this large customer loved the most about their relationship with this Sales Executive.' She also gave a nod to the potential difficulties, conceding that ' it might feel daunting to expand data strategy planning to be as broad as this,' but notes that partnering with vendors and other firms can help. 'Phasing and prioritizing how you bring more of your data into a single system is key to making progress and capturing business value along the way,' she writes. Agents do the Agenting Jones also makes an important point about the use of AI agents. It goes sort of like this: we're used to computers doing calculations, and digesting and presenting information, but these new systems can actually brainstorm on their own to change processes. 'In many instances, agents can optimize workflows themselves as they determine more effective ways to get the work done,' she writes. A Story of Implementation Citing ChatGPT's meteoric rise, Jones talked about using these technologies in the context of her work at Slack, which is, after all, a business communication tool. She chronicled the firm's connection with companies like OpenAI circa 2017. 'At the time, when I was leading Slack, it was exciting to collaborate with OpenAI, Cohere and Anthropic to use their LLMs to help our customers with some of the most challenging productivity challenges at Slack,' she writes. The challenges she enumerates: 'finding a conversation they knew they had but couldn't remember in what channel, or help customers manage the large amount of messages they received with summaries and prioritization, optimize search for information discovery and so much more.' Then, too, the company created tools. 'We introduced Slack Canvas based templates to help our customers quickly create content based on their corporate information, and captured Huddles' meeting notes and action items, and that was just the beginning,' she explains. 'The capabilities of LLMs gave us the opportunity to solve real-world customer challenges in a pleasant and insightful way, while maintaining the experience of the Slack brand.' Calling this kind of thing the 'table stakes' of the new corporate world, Jones walks us through a lot of the way stations on the path to what she calls 'co-intelligence.' That includes workflow automation, agentic AI, multi-agent systems, and new interfaces. Our AI Brethren Here's one way that Jones characterizes managing an AI: 'Considering autonomous agents as truly 'digital workers' can be a helpful framing for questions we already think of today with 'human workers' like: how does the employer track the quality of the work done? What systems does the digital worker have access to? If the company is audited, how do we track what steps and actions were taken by the digital worker? If the digital worker's actions turn malicious, how do we terminate the agent?' As for the extent of agent autonomy, Jones suggests that fully autonomous agents will be able to handle a complex or 'scoped' job on their own, conceding, though, that 'even an autonomous agent, like a human, needs a job scope and definition - or a set of instructions - on the job at hand.' This new world is one we will have to reckon with soon. Four Principles of Leadership Jones finished with a set of ideas for those who are considering these kinds of deployments. 1. Be hands-on: as a leader, stay close to what's happening 2. This one goes back to prior points: working with vendors and partners is a plus 3. Build an AI-first culture with AI-native projects 4. Find the value for your company I found this to be pretty useful for someone who is contemplating a big move in the age of AI. Some of the best ideas for leadership can be gleaned from TED talks, conferences, and these kinds of personal papers on experience with the industry.
