AQR Capital’s Cliff Asness: My Top Ten Peeves

Cliff Asness: My Top Ten Peeves

by ValueWalk StaffDecember 2, 2013

Saying I have a pet peeve, or some pet peeves, just doesn’t do it. I have a menagerie of peeves, a veritable zoo of them. Luckily for readers, I will restrict this editorial to only those related to investing (you do not want to see the more inclusive list) and to only a mere 10 at that. The following are things said or done in our industry or said about our industry that have bugged me for years. Because of the machinegun nature of this piece, these are mostly teasers. I don’t go into all the arguments for my points, and I blatantly ignore counterpoints (to which I assert without evidence that I have countercounterpoints). Some of these are simple, so perhaps the teaser suffices. But some deserve a more thorough treatment that hopefully I, or someone else, will undertake. Some are minor, truly deserving the title “peeve,” and some, more weighty. In each case, as befits an opinion piece, it’s not just my discussion of the peeve but the very prevalence of the peeve itself that is my opinion. I do not extensively cite sources for them. I contend that they are rather widespread throughout the land of financial media, pundits, advisers, and managers. Thus, citing one or two sources would be unfair, and citing them all, impossible. Therefore, please feel free to disagree not just with my discussion of the peeves but also about their very existence! Without further ado, here is a list of things held together by only three characteristics: (1) They are about investing or finance in general, (2) I believe they are commonly held and often repeated beliefs, and (3) I think they are wrong or misleading and they hurt investors.

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About bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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