The late September spike in Chinese equities was very much a trading rather than an investment move and, having pulled back, is now consolidating. We do not see the authorities trying to boost consumer spending by encouraging borrowing, rather that these latest measures are about providing liquidity and thus allowing the housing market to clear at lower prices. More interesting is the medium term efforts to make savings more productive by building a proper capital market, replacing cash for savers and bank loans for companies with pension funds and capital markets. This looks like the start of that process and we suspect there will thus be a focus on long term investing, solid dividends and well regulated corporate bond and equity markets for savers.

Passive and Semi Passive managers are only controlling for benchmark and volatility risk. To the extent that active managers are also controlling for the risk of loss of capital they will generally take less risk and thus generate lower returns - by design. Thus the argument that active can’t beat passive is mis-specified. The closer we move to the underlying investor the more important it is to control for risk of loss of capital rather than risk of loss of job and thus the more value can be added by active managers.

If we had a blank sheet of paper and a New Year resolution to make better investments in 2024, what would we resolve? We would take out the unforced errors built into the system and achieve what Charlie Munger would term an advantage, not by being brilliant, but by consistently 'not being stupid'. That means weighting portfolios by conviction on return not market capitalisation, recognising that volatility and benchmark 'tracking error' are not good measures of risk to the underlying investor but create perverse incentives for managers of other people's money. It also means taking out the emotional element of investing by building systems to eliminate behavioural biases that will enable us to take better decisions.

The Financial media was awash with deserved tributes to Charlie Munger last week. We wanted to add our own, short, tribute to the definitive long term investor, whose thoughts and wisdom are not only timeless, but also in a world of normalisation of interest rates are starting to come back into 'fashion'