Patience Is a Virtue: In Value Investing*
Author | Klaus R. Schenk‐Hoppé,Thorsten Hens |
DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/irfi.12251 |
Date | 01 December 2020 |
Published date | 01 December 2020 |
Patience Is a Virtue: In Value
Investing*
THORSTEN HENS
†,‡,§
AND KLAUS R. SCHENK-HOPPÉ
§,¶
†
Swiss Finance Institute, Department of Banking and Finance, University of Zurich,
Zürich, Switzerland
‡
Faculty of Economics and Management, University of Lucerne, Lucerne, Switzerland
§
Department of Finance, NHH-Norwegian School of Economics, Bergen, Norway and
¶
Department of Economics, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester,
Manchester, UK
ABSTRACT
This note illustrates a simple but important insight for financial investment.
In a heterogeneous agent-based evolutionary finance market model with
long-lived assets, markets are stable if clients of fundamental (“value”) invest-
ment funds are more patient than clients of other funds.
Accepted: 21 November 2018
I. INTRODUCTION
Recent stock market crashes have made market stability a central topic of investors
and policy-makers alike, asking for advice from academia. However, academic
research is divided about the cause of these severe mispricings. In particular, the
importance of the heterogeneity of investors is debated. While Franke and Lüders
(2010) show that in traditional rational expectations models heterogeneity of
investor preferences decreases market stability, behavioral finance models like
those outlined in Shiller (1999) and Shleifer (2000) show that irrational investors
(e.g., trend chasers or noise traders) cause instability and mispricing. This
diversity–stability debate in finance is akin to biological models of interacting spe-
cies (McCann 2000). In this note we show that in a standard heterogeneous agent
financial market model mispricing is smaller if fundamental investors are more
patient than other investors. Thus within this model the diversity–stability debate
comes to the same conclusion as the behavioral financial market models.
Patience is widely praised as one of the keys to investment success (and impa-
tience as the main source of failure) in investment books such as Malkiel’s (2016)
A Random Walk down Wall Street: The Time-tested Strategy for Successful Investing
(first published in 1973 and currently in its 11th edition) or The Little Book of
Common Sense Investing by Bogle (2007), the father of index-investing.
* Financial support by the URPP Finreg of the University of Zurich is gratefully acknowledged.
© 2018 International Review of Finance Ltd. 2018
International Review of Finance, 20:4, 2020: pp. 1019–1031
DOI: 10.1111/irfi.12251
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