The walls of advantage once held by institutional traders over individual investors have come crashing down. Emerging from the dust, there now marches an entire army of real advantages that individual investors hold over their formerly superior big brothers.
In the worlds of fundamental information, charting tools and trading costs, these institutional armies no longer have the high ground. The field is indeed much more level.
Despite all the talk about program trading, derivatives and flash crashes, I urge you not to become demoralized or dispirited. Don’t tiptoe to the sidelines. My objective here is to increase your overall personal satisfaction with your individual investing efforts while bolstering your confidence and stimulating a call to action. There are dozens of actual advantages that we, as individual investors, have over institutional investors. I want to share five that come to mind.
1. In today’s internet age, information is delivered to you at lightning speeds if you harness the power of triggers and alerts offered by most major brokerage houses and delivered via text or email.
2. One-minute data combined with the on balance volume indicator makes it virtually impossible these days for “Mr. Big Institution” to either accumulate or distribute an equity sight unseen behind the curtain. His true intentions can be made transparent to those individual investors who know how to track them.
3. An individual investor’s accounts are always a work in progress. Fortunately, these days we have professional-grade tools at our disposal. Instruments like Morningstar’s X-ray portfolio tool can perform a virtual MRI on all our holdings. It unbundles all our ETFs, mutual funds and equities, thereby exposing the true composition of our portfolios. A partial list of examples includes the following:
a. Allocations by percentage in cash versus stock, foreign equities and others.
b. Style descriptions amongst value, core and growth, as well as segmentation by size for large, mid or small cap stocks.
c. Segment holdings by credit quality and interest rate sensitivity.
d. Segment holdings in the key cyclical, defensive or interest sensitive sectors.
e. Details of your holdings in percentages by stock types, such as distressed, high yield, speculative growth, etc.
f. World regions highlighted with specific exposures to foreign markets.
g. Fees and expenses associated with your ETF and mutual fund holdings.
4. We individual investors are driving virtual sports cars racing against the battleships that are institutional money managers. Our trades don’t need to go to committees, our trades won’t move the market (unless you’re trading penny stocks which you should avoid), and we have a passionate stake in our accounts which no hired hand will ever have.
5. Only we ourselves can provide the sort of emotional profits of say, investing with a CEO we admire and whose business practices align with our own, assuming just the appropriate amount of risk for our family, personality and present situation or divesting of certain types of companies and industries that don’t suit our vision of the future and our planet. Only individual investing can accurately yield these personal emotional profits.
The bottom-line is that as an individual investor, you should be positive, be action-oriented and be a believer. Not only is it a level playing field, but these days, with some skill and discipline, you can achieve investing from a higher ground than the institutions.
Trade well; trade with discipline!
- Gatis Roze, MBA, CMT
- Grayson Roze, Business Manager, StockCharts.com
StockMarketMastery.com
Co-Authors, Tensile Trading (Wiley, 2016)
Co-Presenters, How To Master Your Asset Allocation Profile
