Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Asness: Grossman-Stiglitz paradox proves markets cannot be perfectly efficient

Cliff Asness · Cliff Asness - Simple Investing is Hard (EP.385) · May 13, 2024 · at 13:43

Cliff Asness, founder and CIO of AQR Capital Management, discusses market efficiency theory and why perfect arbitrage does not occur in practice.

0:00 / 0:19exact quote · 19.3s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Grossman and Stiglitz wrote a paper introducing a paradox about a perfectly efficient market a long time ago that people need to spend a lot of money making something perfectly efficient on research, on time, and why are they going to do that if it's perfectly efficient? They're not going to make it perfectly efficient. They're going to spend an optimal amount of money to get it close.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Cliff Asness

Insight
Asness: Social media and ubiquitous data make market inefficiencies longer-lasting
“I think the ubiquity of data, social media, maybe indexing, these things have added up to a market where inefficiencies are bigger and last longer.”
Cliff Asness May 13, 2024 ▶ 55:05 Cliff Asness - Simple Investing is Hard (EP.385)
Prediction Open · timeframe May 2029
Asness: Multi-manager pod shops probably cannot grow by another 5x
“I tend to think those shops probably can't grow by another factor of five. There's just a limit to alpha. There are limits how many great traders that are out there.”
Cliff Asness May 13, 2024 ▶ 45:04 Cliff Asness - Simple Investing is Hard (EP.385)
Insight
Asness: Private equity volatility is higher than public markets despite reported metrics
“Where private equity is well to the left of public equity, and it's concentrated off in levered equity. So if that's vol on the x-axis, it is not to the left.”
Cliff Asness May 13, 2024 ▶ 49:13 Cliff Asness - Simple Investing is Hard (EP.385)
Opinion
Asness: Markets are more efficient and harder to beat than active managers think
“Even today, I think the markets are more efficient, I think, probably than the average active manager. I think they're hard to beat.”
Cliff Asness May 13, 2024 ▶ 16:57 Cliff Asness - Simple Investing is Hard (EP.385)
Disclosure
Asness: AQR models live factor returns at half the backtested result
“Literally, since our Goldman Sachs days, this is more than 25 years ago, we've generally used half a backtest out of sample as a bogey. And life has worked out fairly close to that.”
Cliff Asness May 13, 2024 ▶ 17:57 Cliff Asness - Simple Investing is Hard (EP.385)
Insight
Asness: Painful three-year drawdowns protect value factors from being arbitraged away
“The famous value factor, that can kill your world for three years. That's a terrible thing to live through, a wonderful thing if you don't want a factor to be arbitraged away.”
Cliff Asness May 13, 2024 ▶ 19:03 Cliff Asness - Simple Investing is Hard (EP.385)
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 700 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.