Oliver Cooper

Kevfle recently posted an intriguing article called “Can we beat the professionals?’ In this he touched on some interesting questions around the investment industry, which provoked a flurry of responses from our fantastic community here at Stockopedia. Kevfle seemed to have several questions on his mind, including: Can we actually ever outperform the pros?Am I wasting my time?Is it easier to choose and evaluate a…

Kevfle recently posted an intriguing article called “Can we beat the professionals?’ In this he touched on some interesting questions around the investment industry, which provoked a flurry of responses from our fantastic community here at Stockopedia. Kevfle seemed to have several questions on his mind, including: Can we actually ever outperform the pros?Am I wasting my time?Is it easier to choose and evaluate a…

First Officer: “Captain - one of our engines is failing.”Captain: “Set throttle to maximum thrust on the failing engine.” Even if you have never watched a sci-fi movie before, our captain’s response may sound a little odd to you, and for good reason. Engineering systems are designed to reallocate resources away from failing components and towards working components to ensure the system continues to work.…

Suppose I proposed to you that instead of picking stocks this year, you could have a lucky dip and pick a ball from one of two hats, Hat A or Hat B. Each hat is full of several balls which are coloured either green or red and have a percentage printed on them, where green balls have positive numbers and red balls have negative numbers.…

Hello Andrew, thanks for the comment.It is certainly conversely true that institutional investors have some advantages over private investors as noted at the start of the article; whether there is a net advantage depends on how much the investor adopts their advantages into their process.With regards to whether we can beat the best investors….the challenge here is also identifying the best investors ex-ante as investing…

Thank you for your kind response regarding the article. I am not aware of that paper, but it sounds very intriguing - you have given me some interesting evening reading material!

Thank you for your kind words regarding the article. The impact of fees is one of the aspects that I will be investigating in my follow up article, which should be available next week.

Thank you for taking the time to comment. I agree that an entry point in a stock cannot have an impact on the price (unless you have a whale-like order size!) I think you are correct that the method of cutting losses incorporates the momentum effect but I believe that it also ingrains a discipline of good risk management. With regards to ‘sell what you…

I would say that the four poker styles that you mention above map closer to some of the styles that Lee Freeman-Shor mentions in his book "The Art of Execution". This is as there are broadly two "winning" styles and two "losing" types in his analysis, whereas in Ed's classifications above they can all be profitable. Mapping the style across, I would suggest: Loose Passive…