IN THE WAKE of the global financial crisis of 2007–2009, investment was on people’s minds. From the fraud perpetrated by Bernie Madoff, to the mortgage crisis of 2007 and 2008 and the inadequate yields on “safe” bonds, it seemed as if no part of the economy had been more unsuccessfully managed or regulated than the part related to investing for our families’ futures. And yet, in the ensuing years, the stock market was making new highs, borrowing money had never been cheaper, the credit and operating weaknesses of many industries were being corrected, and a sick economy seemed to be on the mend. Investments that had previously seemed menacing were beginning to appear more promising.
The crisis, and its eventual taming, sparked a national dialogue about these issues. However, this national dialogue focused primarily on contemporary financial, legal, and political contexts. Rarely were broader questions posed about the long-term history and mechanisms of investment that led us to the crisis. What is investment really all about? Who does it? Why do they do it? Is there a story that can be explored and understood? Are there lessons to be learned? It turns out that investment has a rich backstory that can serve to profoundly deepen, if not fundamentally alter, our grasp of the subject and the tasks at hand. Investment—the commitment of resources with the goal of achieving a return—is truly among the central themes in the story of humankind, and we must familiarize ourselves with its past to fully understand many of humankind’s motivations, opportunities, and actions.
The task at hand is enormous in scope. Investment, after all, touches virtually every aspect of life today. Perhaps most obviously, investment underpins our entire economic engine. It is a vital determinant of what projects are funded; how individuals form collectives like companies, institutions, or unions; where in the world capital flows in and out; and when enterprises merge, disaggregate, or dissolve lines of activity. All economic entities are, after all, about investment. A business or institution is a collection of investment projects that grows or contracts based on the returns of those projects relative to its cost of funding.
But investment—one of the most fundamental of human activities—is more than its purely monetary manifestations. It is also intertwined inextricably with social ends: the prospect of homeownership, savings accumulation to finance education, and the health of the endowments of charities. There are very real repercussions on the political landscape as well. Investment affects unemployment, the ability of seniors to retire, the funds deployed to infrastructure and research, and the capacity of a government to access credit markets. Indeed, investment lurks in every corner of daily life and underpins issues of immense importance in both obvious and obscure ways. The fact that there have been few efforts to construct a genuinely comprehensive history of investment given its omnipresence is curious.
This book is not about how to manage investments; rather, as a history of investment and the activities related to it over the centuries, it adds vital perspective to issues in investment management. It traces the development of investment from the earliest civilizations where agricultural land, lending, and trade activities were the economic foundation; to the creation of basic financial, collective, and charitable investment forms; and through the innovation of a vast array of specialized vehicles and funds extending into the twenty-first century. Throughout the book, we trace the evolution of the single most important development in the history of investment: its democratization.
The democratization of investment—the extension of access to investment activities to the population at large—was the outcome of the advent of joint-stock companies, the Industrial Revolution, and the development of public markets. It was, in time, the driving force behind the concept of retirement and its funding, the building of diversified investment portfolios, the expansion of securities regulation, the growing understanding of cyclical crises and investment theory, and the development of independent and entrepreneurial investment managers. However, we must qualify our use of the term democratization. This expansion of access to the populace does not mean that everyone’s access to or sharing of the rewards is equal. Democracy does not necessarily entail complete equality. Nonetheless, taking a longer historical perspective reveals that the democratization of investment is indeed a transformative phenomenon in investment’s history, and it is indisputable that investment access has expanded beyond the members of what in this book we call the power elite of premodern times. It also does not mean that investment’s democratization is, or should be, over. Far from it. Investment’s democratization is a project that should and will continue.
THE FOUR INVESTMENT PRINCIPLES
In order to set the stage for this vast story, our discussion begins with an explanation of the four unifying principles that support effective investment thinking. These four concepts are a basis for grasping the fundamentals of investment: real ownership, the importance of seeking value, the key role of financial leverage, and the crucial function of resource allocation in the success of an investment project.
These principles are introduced to frame the substance and mechanics of investment. They are thus intended to deepen the reader’s understanding by whittling away at the marble block to slowly arrive at a concept of investment that is more sensitive to its nuances and complexities than any single pithy definition could be. After all, an insightful characterization of investment is a vital precursor to appreciating its long and storied history.
Throughout the book, we discuss direct investment activities and investment in financial instruments that represent claims upon these direct investments. Although at first glance these seem to be very different types of investments, they are not. This view agrees with that held by the acknowledged dean of US investors of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Warren Buffett. Buffett has long contended that acquiring a company directly and purchasing the stock that represents a claim on that company are not substantively different.1 This means that direct investment and investment in financial instruments should both lead to the same outcome: real ownership.
So, the first principle is that investment is not fundamentally different whether it involves open market purchases of public securities or private purchases of whole or portions of enterprises. The essential act of investment in both cases is still “the commitment of resources with the goal of achieving a return.” Therefore, owning a business and owning its shares are basically the same. Throughout history there has been little practical difference between ownership and share ownership. The investor must act as if he or she has bought the business, not just a piece of paper. The appearance of distance from the actual business is illusory, for in both cases the investor must face the actual investment challenge at hand—namely, properly analyzing and valuing the business activity to which he or she is committing.
Fundamental Value
The second principle is the fundamental role of value. John Burr Williams, the twentieth-century American economist and author of The Theory of Investment Value, offers a concise but powerful definition of the investment value of a going concern: “the present worth of the future dividends.” In other words, the value of an investment in the equity of a company is simply the present value of all future dividends, plus any predictable principal payments, also adjusted to present value.2
This definition is, and always has been, of practical importance to every investor because it delineates between sound investment practice and speculation. This is because a security purchased by an investor at a price below its investment value can usually yield a total return above its price. On the other hand, if an investor purchases a security at a greater price than its fundamental value, as described earlier, he or she is more likely to face a loss, unless the security is sold to another party willing to speculate on the swings of the markets (that is, the “greater fool”). As such, prudent investors often depend on estimates of investment value when making decisions regarding their transactions in the financial markets. Value provides an indispensable guide in terms of buying and selling.3
There have been countless examples of a failure to consider fundamental value in investing over the centuries. The most dramatic have been infamous “bubbles” involving gross overvaluation of securities or commodities that have led to calamitous market collapses and investment losses. Less chronicled are the great bargain opportunities that some of these crashes and other depressed conditions have created among investment choices. Value investing has on occasion been the dramatic source of almost unimaginable profits.
Financial Leverage
The third principle is the importance of financial leverage. Throughout history, people have secured credit for a variety of purposes, both personal and commercial. Borrowing for personal purposes was common to the ancients, just as it is to us today. Both ancient Greece and classical Rome employed loans broadly to finance profit-making activities as well. Since agricultural land was the foremost earning asset and enjoyed great prestige, the most significant productive borrowings were against this land, but borrowing to finance trade was also relatively common. As industry developed from the fifteenth century onward, credit also facilitated the financing of activities and assets for industrial development, growth, and achievement of a return.4
Financial leverage has long been an important contributor to the achievement of outstanding investment outcomes, as well as to disastrous ones. When an investment is a success, however, people do not generally talk about the role leverage has played. When it comes to failures, by contrast, leverage often takes the blame. This is precisely how most people understood the spectacular investment failure of Long-Term Capital Management, a large hedge fund management firm, in 1998. The firm, it was later discovered, had been magnifying its portfolio with leverage ratios as high as 100 to 1—that is, $100 of debt-equivalent employed for every dollar of equity committed. Even though the firm was invested primarily in high-quality government bonds, its use of this extraordinary leverage created so much risk that even minor fluctuations in the value of its portfolio could cause extreme pressure on its available net worth. Had it not been for a government-organized bailout, Long-Term Capital Management would almost certainly have collapsed.5
On the other hand, there have been great investment successes over extended periods of time achieved by well-regarded investors (Warren Buffett again comes to mind) through the use of more moderate levels of financial leverage coupled with good asset selection and stable financing sources. Buffett’s exceptional performance over the years can, in part, be attributed to a leverage ratio of about 1.6 to 1 and a low cost of debt financing.6
In sum, financial leverage magnifies risk exposure: it magnifies profits if the investment is successful and magnifies losses when the investment is badly analyzed or ill timed. Leverage is, therefore, the sharpest of double-edged swords. However, it has been strikingly important to both profound entrepreneurial success and dramatic investment growth.
Resource Allocation
Resource allocation—the process of allocating capital and human resources—in an investment setting began to emerge as far back as the Commercial Revolution and the successes of the merchant banks of the Italian city-states. Clear evidence shows that in fifteenth-century Florence, for example, the Medici and others who aggressively committed their financial and human resources to funding ventures in finance, textile fabricating, and trade had an acute awareness of the importance of resource allocation. They showed remarkably “modern” acuity by understanding the importance of analyzing available investment opportunities, matching them with capital and human capabilities, and applying these judiciously.7 Indeed, we can even find this acuity in ancient Greek and Roman estate management, wherein estate owners selected managers who made decisions about agricultural resources and capital investments in order to maximize returns.
Although the modern concept of the CEO as an executor of management technique, objective setting, and implementation has continued to be dominant, another management model has gained traction in recent years. The success of CEOs who place emphasis on effective allocation of capital and people has led to a reappraisal of the hierarchy of management skills.8 Noteworthy examples of these CEOs include Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway), Henry Singleton (Teledyne), and Thomas Murphy (Capital Cities), all of whom have demonstrated the significant impact of CEOs as allocators of capital and human resources.
Often this focus on capital allocation is paired with an executive style that emphasizes meaningful decentralization in the management hierarchy. Decentralization provides substantial autonomy to carefully vetted division managers or subsidiary CEOs. Decentralized management approaches identify experienced, skilled, and accomplished leaders for different segments of a business network, allowing them to operate with relatively little day-to-day supervision beyond that exercised via control of major available resources. In the view of many management theorists, management control of this sort offers distinct advantages over the more minute-to-minute frenetic activity of dominating, control-oriented CEOs.9
Henry Singleton, the CEO of Teledyne from the 1960s to the 1980s, was a wonderful example of this management style. While there were earlier CEOs who focused more on resource allocation than on the more traditional management skills such as execution of management technique and implementation of day-to-day management plans, Singleton seemed to be the most striking contemporary departure from this dominant model. Among other things, Singleton was devoted to shrinking Teledyne’s number of outstanding shares, often in lieu of potential acquisitions and substantial investments in plant and equipment. His focus was on return on shareholders’ investment rather than on pure measures of revenue growth.10
THE ORGANIZATION OF THIS BOOK
The structure of the book is both chronological and thematic. We begin with accounts and narratives of investment in ancient times and continue to the present day. The historical content, however, is largely organized around our central theme: the democratization of investment. Over a three-hundred-year span, between 1600 and 1900, investment evolved from an activity exclusively benefiting the power elite to one that was also available to, and for the benefit of, the middle class: merchants, entrepreneurs, industrialists, and businesspeople.
In order to appreciate the historical significance of the democratization of investment, one must have an understanding of how investment was developed and organized in other eras and cultures. In ancient civilizations, agricultural land was the foundation of wealth and investment. Moreover, only members of the power elite—those with wealth and status affiliated with the leaders of government, church, nobility, or military—were landowners or investors. Commoners accumulated little, if any, surplus. This first chapter also explores the investment structures that supported the beginnings of global trade and commerce. As rudimentary as investment was in those times, however, we can see glimmerings of financial sophistication in the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and Asia. There we find instances of collateralized lending, forms of insurance, the concept of limited liability for investment partnerships, and profit-sharing arrangements. The history of investment is also intertwined with the history of lending at interest, and different religious and cultural attitudes about the concept of usury have influenced many investment and lending structures.
Chapter 2 picks up this historical narrative of investment in modernity by examining the three major developments that brought about a dramatic change in the participants in and activities of investment: the creation of joint-stock companies, the Industrial Revolution, and the advent of public markets. These developments created a middle class that could achieve surpluses and provided them with avenues to invest their new wealth. For the first time in history, investment and wealth-building activities were accessible to individuals who were not members of the power elite. The ascension of these nonelite investing individuals also brought into being another unprecedented development: the emergence of the concept of retirement and its funding.
Chapter 3 traces this emergence and explores the ways in which financing retirement has produced the largest aggregation of investment capital in the world. The focus on funding retirement has profoundly changed our institutions, the investment vehicles they employ, and also the people involved in managing retirement resources and funds. The idea that funding retirement is a major goal of investment has had important consequences for our society—such as the growth of pension funds and defined contribution retirement plans—and these concepts and instruments continue to evolve to this day.
This history continues into chapter 4, which explores the new clients and new investment forms that proliferated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While individuals are the most important new client type, other clients like endowments, foundations, and sovereign wealth funds have become influential in the business of investment. What are now regarded as basic investments (life insurance, savings accounts, separate accounts, and mutual funds) came into being as a result of the demand from these new clients.
Chapter 5 turns from a relatively chronological narrative toward a thematic one: the history of fraud, market manipulation, and insider trading. These examples of malfeasance actually play only a small role in the history of investment, although they have received a disproportionate amount of attention. Furthermore, much of our contemporary regulatory structures were created in response to these incidents, and it is important to understand their origins. For instance, it is only in recent times that insider trading, once seen as an acceptable prerogative of those with wealth and access, has been targeted for prohibition. Market manipulation, too, was once rampant, and those with sufficient power could move markets to their advantage. In these case studies, we show how the government, its regulatory bodies, and the public have come to understand and react to these issues of fairness. Now, manipulation in major markets tends to be less flagrant and usually requires the collusion of an array of participants. These regulatory developments have given investors more confidence that they are participating in an equitable, more democratized market.
Chapters 6 and 7 delve into contemporary economics and investment theory. Chapter 6 explores the works of key economists like John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, and Ben Bernanke. It argues that these economists have improved our ability to manage the economy for the well-being of all, partly by reducing the disruptive effects of cyclical crises. However, we have yet to fully extricate ourselves from unhelpful cyclical patterns of behavior—such as cycles of excessive confidence and appetite for risk—that still provoke these crises. Chapter 7 examines the twentieth-century emergence of a theoretical framework for understanding the fundamental investment principles. Scientists and economists worked to develop models to describe the movements of markets and articulated such concepts as randomness, the effects of diversification, and the impact of economics. Other new concepts such as the capital asset pricing model, beta, alpha, factor models, and mean-variance optimization also emerged and shed light on portfolio construction.
Chapter 8 is related in scope and structure to chapter 4 in covering investment vehicles, except that it discusses the much more recently developed—rather than the earlier and more basic—vehicles. These include alternative investments as well as low-cost index and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Alternative investments—including hedge funds, private equity, venture capital, and a wide variety of other asset classes such as real estate, commodities, farmland, other natural resources, and infrastructure—are specialized investment vehicles mostly offered to sophisticated institutions and wealthy individuals. In most cases they offer the expectation of superior risk-adjusted performance, and in almost all cases they offer diversification in an investment portfolio. They also tend to come with higher, and often performance-linked, fees. Index funds and ETFs, on the other hand, are mass market, low-cost, and broadly diversified or sector-focused portfolios of mostly public equity or fixed income securities. They offer generally passive participation in investment markets. These two types of new investment forms are dramatically different but together offer investors the opportunity for employing modern investment techniques and theory-based improvements in constructing portfolios.
Chapter 9 argues that the rise of independent investment managers and entrepreneurial investors has transformed the landscape of investment. Most of the innovations in the field have been created by young and independent firms, and institutional clients have been receptive to the new vehicles, techniques, and fee arrangements they have deployed. The new and dramatic opportunities for business success on the part of investment managers have brought a vast increase in profitability and have established a new elite: those who manage money for institutions in the United States and abroad. However, the institutions this elite serves are largely engaged in the management of the assets of the general population—a reversal of the situation we saw in ancient times, when lower-class managers invested money for the benefit of only the power elite.
Future developments in investment management will involve broader application of investment theory and a change in our relationships with investment professionals. Successful investment managers will be the ones who focus on providing performance and counsel, rather than just selling products. Successful investors will be those who wake up to the fundamental truth that few managers and no single investment strategy can produce outsized returns persistently, and they will therefore pay less for advice or will seek out truly thoughtful investment approaches. And for investment itself, what was once a privilege of the few will have become a benefit to the many.
