In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. In this series, they discuss Chapter 34: Bear Markets: A Necessary Evil.

LEARNING: Investors must view bear markets as necessary evils.

“If stocks didn’t experience the kind of bear markets that we have, investors would be very unhappy.”

Larry Swedroe

In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. The book is a collection of stories that Larry has developed over 30 years as the head of financial and economic research at Buckingham Wealth Partners to help investors. You can learn more about Larry’s Worst Investment Ever story on Ep645: Beware of Idiosyncratic Risks.

Larry deeply understands the world of academic research and investing, especially risk. Today, Andrew and Larry discuss Chapter 34: Bear Markets: A Necessary Evil.

Chapter 34: Bear Markets: A Necessary Evil

In this chapter, Larry explains why investors must view bear markets as necessary evils. He says that if stocks didn’t experience the kind of bear markets that we have, investors would be very unhappy.

Larry further explains that the most basic finance principle is the relationship between risk and expected, but not guaranteed, return. So, the higher the risk, the higher the expected return, which means that if the risk is high, investors will apply a bigger risk premium, which will lead to the denominator in the formula of the Net Present Value. The numerator is the expected earnings. The denominator is the risk-free rate plus the risk premium.

The higher the risk, the higher the premiums

Larry highlights historical bear markets, noting the U.S. has experienced losses exceeding 34% during the COVID crisis and 51% from 2007 to 2009. He argues that these losses are essential for investors to demand higher risk premiums. The very fact that investors have experienced such significant losses leads them to price stocks with a large risk premium.

From 1926 through 2022, the S&P provided an annual risk premium over one-month Treasury bills of 8.2% and an annualized premium of 6.9%. If the losses that investors experienced had been smaller, the risk premium would also have been smaller. And the smaller the losses experienced, the smaller the premium would have been.

In other words, the less risk investors perceive, the higher the price they are willing to pay for stocks. And the higher the market’s price-to-earnings ratio, the lower the future returns.

Staying the course during underperformance

The bottom line, Larry says, is that bear markets are necessary for the creation of the large equity risk premium we have experienced. Thus, if investors want stocks to provide high expected returns, bear markets (while painful to endure) should be considered a necessary evil.

However, Larry notes that it is during the periods of underperformance that investor discipline is tested. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that most investors significantly underperform the stock market and the mutual funds they invest in. The underperformance is because investors act like generals fighting the last war.

Subject to recency bias (the tendency to overweight recent events/trends and ignore long-term evidence), they observe yesterday’s winners and jump on the bandwagon—buying high—and they observe yesterday’s losers and abandon ship—selling low. It is almost as if investors believe they can buy yesterday’s returns when they can only buy tomorrow’s.

Keys to successful investing

Larry shares three keys to successful investing to ensure you get the most from your investments even during bear markets.

The first key is to have a well-thought-out plan that includes understanding the nature of the risks of investing. That means accepting that bear markets are inevitable and must be built into the plan.

This understanding will help you feel prepared and less anxious when bear markets occur. It also means having the discipline to stay the course when it is most difficult (partly because the media will be filled with stories of economic doom and gloom).

What is particularly difficult is that staying the course does not just mean buying and holding. Adhering to a plan requires that investors rebalance their portfolio, maintaining their desired asset allocation. That means that investors must buy stocks during bear markets and sell them in bull markets.

The second key to successful investing, Larry suggests, is to avoid taking more risk than you have the ability, willingness, and need to take. By steering clear of excessive risk, investors are more likely to stay the course and avoid the common buy high/sell low pattern that most investors fall into.

The last key is to understand that trying to time the market is a loser’s game—one that is possible to win but not prudent to try because the odds of doing so are so poor.

Chapter 34: Bear Markets: A Necessary Evil

The higher the risk, the higher the premiums

Staying the course during underperformance

Keys to successful investing

Further reading

Did you miss out on the previous chapters? Check them out:

Part I: How Markets Work: How Security Prices are Determined and Why It’s So Difficult to Outperform

Part II: Strategic Portfolio Decisions