The key to markets is always evolving both with the dominant business themes and market themes. Most people I have observed get too wedded to a kind of business or market process that worked for them, many times early in their career.
PRE-TAX ALPHA IS REALLY IMPORTANT FOR TAX-AWARE LONG-SHORT STRATEGIES!
A new paper by the AQR crew. The finding is that for tax-aware strategies to really work, you need both the freedom to short and the ability to generate pre-tax alpha.
In more detail, the paper concludes that:
- Pre-tax alpha is not just compatible with tax-efficient investing. It is a key driver of tax benefits and investor wealth in long-short strategies. The whole thing is a blaah in the long-run without pre-tax alpha.
- Shorting and leverage are pretty much necessary to unlock the benefits. For traditional direct indexing, increasing alpha has only a modest net effect on total tax benefits because the various positive and negative mechanisms largely offset each other.
The interaction between alpha, leverage and shorting, and time horizon leads to faster asset growth, greater tax-loss harvesting opportunities, and substantially higher long-run after-tax wealth.
Every year, tens of billions of dollars are being stolen by overseas stock manipulators pumping and dumping small Nasdaq-listed Chinese companies.
I made a website so we can expose the scams and fight back.