Venerated Voices™ 2018 Rankings

by Jill Mislinski, 1/21/19

Advisor Perspectives, a leading publisher serving financial advisors and the financial advisory community, has announced its Venerated Voices™ awards for commentaries published in 2018. Rankings were issued in four categories: The Top 25 Venerated Voices™ by Firm and Author, the Top 10 Venerated Voices™ by Commentary, and a new category, The Top 25 Venerated Voices™ by Firm and Author (minimum 12 posts annually).

Leading the Top 25 Venerated Voices™ by Firm category was GMO of Boston, followed by Hussman Funds of Maryland. In third place was Mauldin Economics of Arizona.

Among individual commentators, the most-widely read were Jeremy Grantham of GMO in first place, Rob Arnott, Vitali Kalesnik, and Jim Masturzo of Research Affiliates in second place, followed by James Montier of GMO in third place.

The most-widely read commentary of 2018 was Bracing Yourself for a Possible Near-Term Melt-Up by Jeremy Grantham of GMO. Published January 4th, Grantham analyzed the great bubbles of the past, and looked at “price acceleration” and the outperformance of quality and low-beta stocks. He also mentioned the importance of extreme overvaluation and the Fed’s role in bubbles breaking. Grantham concluded by offering a few suggestions for an action plan moving forward.

Ben Inker, also of GMO, took second place with GMO Quarterly Letter. The piece was published February 20th and imagined managing Stalin’s hypothetical pension fund that required achieving inflation plus a 4.5% return over the next decade (or, if you failed, you would be shot). This was based on a problem originally posed by Jeremy Grantham; Inker reframed it in relative terms and suggested using a traditional portfolio instead of a “Stalin” portfolio. Even with “Stalinesque” pieces of a portfolio, Inker concluded that it comes down to the ability to hire talented managers and luck.

Jeffrey Saut of Raymond James took third place with Two of the Most Important Investing Paragraphs We Have Ever Read. The piece was published April 16th and used two paragraphs from Edgar Genstein’s Stock Profits Without Forecasting as a basis for investing advice. Genstein recommended, “…sell when you wish you had sold sooner…” and as a result, “…some of your profits will be large, and your losses should be quite small.” Saut described an addition to this that Raymond James has adopted: scale sell partial positions. He claimed this will allow capital gains accruals to the portfolio and will rebalance stock positions to their original intended weightings.

Advisor Perspectives’ website currently attracts over 170,000 unique visitors per month, virtually all of them financial advisors serving high- and ultra-high net worth individuals. The company publishes economic and market commentaries submitted by fund companies, advisors and independent research firms. In 2018, over 2,000 such commentaries were published and made available through a daily newsletter, Research Perspectives, which the company emails to its subscribers.