In the real inflationary world stocks more generally rise in price over time, resulting in more sell trades than buy trades. In Mr L's examples he was more typically looking to demonstrate the effect of repeated halving and doubling back up again type cycles that were flat overall over the total period and as such were more prone to equal numbers of buys and sells.
we must all be bad stock pickers because all we seem to talk about is not having enough cash, not too much!
IMO Mr L was a pioneer of what is more recently called Fat Tail Minimisation (FTM) type methods such as advocated by the likes of Nassim Taleb and Larry Swedroe. Mostly safe, a little speculative.
To match the rewards of more conventional blends, the speculative exposure needs to average above-average rewards, so that holding less exposure to that averages out overall to similar type rewards to blends with higher levels of exposure to stocks.
Taleb goes for something like speculative options. Swedroe opts for small cap value. In Mr L's case he opted for high ROCAR via trading (adding low, reducing high).
Over the long haul, his original (classic) AIM had a tendency towards being a FTM type blend. Both of these next two backtests were started with 50-50 stock/cash but over time steered towards holding around 30% stock, 70% cash. I added the second as the first starts just prior to the Wall Street Crash era, so that could be a distorted view, the second starts from 1950 to provide a comparison.
In both cases the AIM's average stock exposure achieved a higher reward compared to buy and holds average stock exposure and as such acts as the Options that Taleb uses or Small Cap Value that Swedroe uses.
A common tendency is to push AIM to perhaps reward more than the original intent. Instead of taking money off the table in good times to cover us during bad times (putting some aside for a rainy day), if we leave to much exposure during the good times then when bad times do come along we encounter a double-whammy hit, as we lose both on the core exposure amount and all of our rainy day funds also get hit. Yes putting rainy day money at risk during the good times can yield even better rewards during those times, but that's not something that your granny would have done.
Here's a thought for the day
Governments like a little inflation and might target something like 2% inflation as the Bank of England are under remit to do. Generally a 5 year treasury (5YrT) averages around 2% real gains over the longer term (at least it has since the 1920's), albeit in a sporadic manner. If inflation averages 2% and 5yrT yields 2% real then 50% in 5YrT in effect uplifts the whole (100%) fund by inflation. So you could put half in 5YrT and half under the mattress and overall perhaps see the total keep up with inflation over time.
If instead of keeping money stuffed in a mattress you invest those funds perhaps in stocks and stocks gain say 10%, then in having half of funds exposed to that gain that's like having a 5% real reward relative to the total fund value (as the 5YrT half uplifted the whole in line with inflation).
In this light a sensible approach might be to use a 50-50 AIM. There is even some good reasons to be even more conservative and perhaps opt to split 50-50 between 5YrT and an AIM, with that AIM split 50-50 stock/cash (so overall 25% stocks, 75% safe). Often however, including Mr L, the swing seems to go the other way and investors push for much higher levels of stock (risk) exposure. Conservative approaches will lag potentially significantly during strong and prolonged bull runs. Every strong bull run however has ultimately corrected back down again. The temptation, as demonstrated by Mr L, is to performance chase the strong bulls, but in so doing you're investing your rainy day money (potentially at a relatively high price level) and in putting it at risk come the heavy rain you're more likely to end up short on cash.
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
AI
